In recent years, decentralization of financial and political power has been perceived as a useful means to improve outcomes of the health care sector of many European countries. Such reforms could be the result of fashionable policy trends, rather than being based on knowledge of "what works"....

Previous studies of gender differences in relation to medical specialization have focused more on social variables than hospital-specific factors. In a multivariate analysis with extended Cox regression, we used register data for socio-demographic variables (gender, family and having a child...

Studies of government budget-making recurrently describe it as a bargaining process between `guardians' and `advocates'. Yet this observation has not been implemented in formal modelling of budgetary processes. This paper employs a Nash model to analyse local government budgeting. The model is...

In industrialized countries, female physicians have up to 10h lower labor supply a week than male physicians. At the same time, the number of female physicians is increasing. The question analyzed in this article is whether these differences in labor supply for female and male hospital...

Objectives This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of obtaining and interpreting efficiency measurement on the level of the clinical department. We discuss the limitations of case-mix groupings such as the diagnosis related groups on this level.Methods Hospital costs are allocated...