The authors examine changes in the wages, employment, and effort of nurses in California hospitals following takeovers by large chains using 1990s data. The market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony, so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with...

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...

This paper examines the effects of conversions between For-Profit and Not-For-Profit forms on quality of medical care in California hospitals. The sample includes elderly patients treated in California's private hospitals from 1990 to 1998 for Acute Myocardial Infarction and Congestive Heart...

This paper examines the productive efficiency of the hospital sector in Switzerland. A panel data of 214 general hospitals over the four-year period between 1998 and 2001 has been analyzed. A descriptive analysis of the data casts some light on differences across hospital types especially...

This paper explores the hospital quality measures based on routine administrative data such as patient discharge records. Most of the measures used in the literature are based on in-hospital mortality risks rather than post-discharge events. The in-hospital outcomes are sensitive to the...

This paper applies a number of stochastic cost frontier models to a panel data set and compares their ability to distinguish unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency variation among firms. The main focus is on Greene's 2005 panel data model that incorporates firm-specific effects in a...

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...

The authors examine changes in the wages, employment, and effort of nurses in California hospitals following takeovers by large chains in the 1990s. The market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony, so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with...

This paper studies the cost structure of Swiss gas distribution utilities. Several econometric models are applied to a panel of 26 companies over 1996–2000. Our main objective is to estimate the optimal size and scale economies of the industry and to study their possible variation with respect...