This paper is a case study of the use of public use administrative data for the estimation of empirical relations when key dependent variables are not available in the data. It is shown that the out-of-hospital mortality rates can be identified using the patient discharge data without...

With prospective payment of hospitals becoming more common, measuring their performance is gaining in importance. However, the standard cost frontier model yields biased efficiency scores because it ignores technological heterogeneity between hospitals. In this paper, efficiency scores are...

This paper analyzes the labor productivity of Swiss university departments between 1995 and 2007. Using a parametric input distance function we estimate and decompose the Malmquist productivity indexes in line with Fuentes et al. (2001) and Atkinson et al. (2003). By contrast to those studies,...

Using a choice experiment conducted among more than a thousand Swiss consumers, we analyze the individual demand for voluntary carbon offsets in different contexts. The analysis is used to identify the consumers’ underlying motives for offsetting emissions, the context effects on their...