We explore whether NHS hospitals managed their earnings upward before applying for Foundation Trust (FT) status, a scheme that allowed them greater financial freedom and management autonomy, in order to present an overly positive picture and increase their chances for a successful application....

Improving accountability in public services has been a central ob-jective of many public sector reforms in recent years. Chief amongthese have been efforts to generate observable performance measuresas a basis for monitoring performance. This paper examines a nat-ural experiment in regimes...