Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

The French hospital industry is one example of a market where public, private nonprofit and private for-profit hospitals co-exist in significant proportions. Recently, several administrative reports have shown that in France public and private nonprofit hospitals are more costly than for-profit...

There is ongoing debate about the effect of ownership on hospital performance as regards efficiency and care quality. This paper proposes an analysis of the differences in productivity and efficiency between French public and private hospitals. In France, public and private hospitals do not only...

Background— Women with acute myocardial infarction have a higher hospital mortality rate than men. This difference has been ascribed to their older age, more frequent comorbidities, and less frequent use of revascularization. The aim of this study is to assess these factors in relation to...

The purpose of this paper is to study hospital costs in the event of introduction of a Prospective Payment System in France. We use a nested three dimensional database (stays-hospitals-years) to identify hospital unobservable heterogeneity and a transitory moral hazard component of cost...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...