Conflicting theories of the nonprofit firm have existed for several decades yet empirical research has not resolved these debates, partly because the theories are not easily testable but also because empirical research generally considers organizations in isolation rather than in markets. Here...

Over the past twenty-five years, about 330 (7 percent) of the country's 5,000 not-for-profit hospitals have converted to for-profit form This paper explores the causes and effects of conversions through two case studies -- Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas and the Columbia/HealthOne...

Little is known about how the adoption and diffusion of medical innovation is related to and influenced by market characteristics such as competition. The particular complications involved in investigating these relationships in the health care sector may explain the dearth of research. We...

Nonprofit charitable organizations are exempt from most taxes, including local property taxes, but U.S. cities and towns increasingly request that nonprofits make payments in lieu of taxes (known as PILOTs). Strictly speaking, PILOTs are voluntary, though nonprofits may feel pressure to make...

Certificate of Need Laws (CON), state laws requiring providers to obtain licenses before adopting healthcare technology, have been controversial. The effect of CON on technology supply has not been well established. In part this is because analyses have focused on state-level supply effects,...

Roughly one half of hospitals in the U.S. are in rural areas, yet researchers have largely studied the effects of hospital ownership in the urban context. We examine differences in the provision of profitable and unprofitable medical services in rural areas across nonprofit, for-profit, and...

Estimates of the impact of Certificate of Need laws on medical care have been inconsistent, possibly because not all CON laws apply to all services. Using an original dataset identifying imaging-related CON laws, we estimate the effects of CON on CT and MRI, using regression discontinuities at...