Whenever you phone your mother, switch on the light, or buy health insurance you purchase a service or product from a chain of vertically related industries. Providers of these products or services need access to a telecommunications network, an electricity network or to health care...

The current institutional reforms in the Dutch healthcare sector may increase the extent of vertical relations (such as vertical contracts and vertical integration) between insurers and healthcare providers. Vertical relations may have both welfare increasing and welfare reducing effects. In...

This chapter provides a literature overview on the use of input-output (I-O) analysis in efficiency and productivity measurements. The exposition covers both the traditional I-O modeling framework and its extension to frontier-based I-O approach that adds elements of frontier analysis into the...