Effects of Ownership on Hospital Efficiency in Germany

The objective of our study was to evaluate the efficiency of public, private for-profit, and private non-profithospitals in Germany. First, bootstrapped data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to evaluate the efficiencyof a panel (n = 1,046) of public, private for-profit, and private non-profit hospitals between 2002and 2006. This was followed by a second-step truncated linear regression model with bootstrapped DEAefficiency scores as dependent variable. The results show that public hospitals performed significantlybetter than their private for-profit and non-profit counterparts. In addition, we found a significant positiveassociation between hospital size and efficiency, and that competitive pressure had a significant negativeimpact on hospital efficiency.