Ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), limited-service alternatives for treating surgery patients not requiring an overnight stay, are a health‐care service innovation that has proliferated in the U.S. and other countries in recent years. This paper examines the effects of ASC competition on...

This paper estimates frontier cost functions for US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals in FY2000 that are consistent with economic theory and explicitly account for cost differences across patients' risk, level of access to care, quality of care, and hospital-specific characteristics....

This paper explores the relationship between cost and quality of hospital care. A total operating cost function is estimated for 137 US Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals for 1988-1993 using three rate-based measures of quality as regressors. The high likelihood of the existence of...