Hospital readmission rates are increasingly used as signals of hospital performance and a basis for hospital reimbursement. However, their interpretation may be complicated by differential patient survival rates. If patient characteristics are not perfectly observable and hospitals differ in...

This paper develops an extension of the class of finite mixture models for longitudinal count data to the bivariate case by using a trivariate reduction technique and a hidden Markov chain approach. The model allows for disentangling unobservable time-varying heterogeneity from the dynamic...

Increasing evidence shows that hospital competition under fixed prices can improve quality and reduce cost. Concerns remain, however, that competition may undermine socio-economic equity in the utilisation of care. We test this hypothesis in the context of the pro-competition reforms of the...

This study developed a method for measuring change in socio-economic equity in health care utilisation using small area level administrative data. Our method provides more detailed information on utilisation than survey data but only examines socio-economic differences between neighbourhoods...