Economists seeking to improve the efficiency of health care delivery frequently emphasize two issues: the fragmented structure of physician practices and poorly designed physician incentives. This paper analyzes these issues from the perspective of organizational economics. We begin with a brief...

How does team-specific capital affect productivity? We examine the teams that primary care physicians (PCPs) assemble when referring patients to specialists. Our theoretical model finds that team-specific capital is greater when PCPs concentrate their referrals within a smaller set of...

We propose a "common-agency" model for explaining inefficient contracting in the U.S. healthcare system. In our setting, common-agency problems arise when multiple payers seek to motivate a shared provider to invest in improved care coordination. Our approach differs from other common-agency...

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are new organizations created by the Affordable Care Act to encourage more efficient, integrated care delivery. To promote efficiency, ACOs sign contracts under which they keep a fraction of the savings from keeping costs below target provided they also...

Using an "effort-regulation" type of efficiency wage model, it is demonstrated that a firm may respond to slackening labor markets by acting to increase the intensity with which workers work. The magnitude of this work intensity effect depends on the structure of employment relations. Where...

In his seminal 1943 paper on the political business cycle, Michal Kalecki (1971) argued that industrial leaders feared full employment because the economic insecurity created by unemployment was necessary to keep wages low and maintain work intensity and discipline on the shop floor. On the...

A central hypothesis of the theory of labor market segmentation is that large establishments tend to establish circumstances of employment which foster employment stability. According to this view, large employers stabilize their labor relations by instituting job ladders, grievance procedures,...