We examine vertical integration and exclusive vertical restraints in health-care markets where insurers and hospitals bilaterally bargain over contracts. We employ a bargaining model in a concentrated health-care market of two hospitals and two health insurers competing on premiums. Without...

Health care provision is undergoing major reforms in Europe as a reaction to rapidly increasing expenditure and lowered political acceptance to commit public finance to cover the deficits. The Dutch government will decide in 2007 if the current budget system will be replaced by a more...

There is a broad literature on the consequences of applying different welfare standards in merger control. Total welfare is usually defined as the sum of consumer and provider surplus, i.e., potential external effects are not considered. The general result is then that consumer welfare is a more...

The paper presents a study of the total factor productivity (TFP) performance among developed countries between 1985 and 1990. The analysis includes the three large economies: the US, Japan and Europe. A general equilibrium model of these economies is used to estimate TFP growth at the sectoral...

This document provides a review of recent theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between entry, exit and productivity. Decomposition methods show that entry and exit considerably contribute to productivity growth, but are unable to shed any light on the ultimate sources of...

This study assesses the role of feed-in tariffs (FITs) and renewable energy certificates (RECs) in creating incentives for cross-border investments and for investments in particular technological portfolios via M&A. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 11pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;"><span style="color: #000000;">The analysis explores the dataset on M&As in alternative energy sources...</span></span>

The intensification of the dairy sector and the associated detrimental impacts on the environment has geared agri-environmental policies towards fulfilling environmental objectives. This study examines the impact of such policies and intensification on the hyperbolic efficiency of Dutch dairy...

We examine the impact of competition on outcome and process indicators of hospital quality. While earlier literature on the relationship between competition and hospital quality mainly focused on outcome indicators, we argue that the inclusion of process indicators in the analysis can provide...

The paper applies both the standard DEA methodology with contemporaneous frontiers and DEA with sequential frontiers to study changes in productivity and efficiency in manufacturing for a sample of eleven OECD countries over a twenty-year period. It uses a decomposition of the industrial...