If specialisation is supposed to reduce costs why is reimbursement often more generous for specialist than non-specialist hospitals? Specialist hospitals claim that gains from specialism are offset because they attract patients with more complex care requirements. We assess the foundation for...

We evaluate how the productive structure and level of specialization of a hospital affect technical efficiency by analyzing a six-year panel database (2000/2005) drawn from hospital discharge records and Ministry of Health data. We adopt a distance function approach, while measuring the...

The main objective of this article is to evaluate to which extent the set of national and regional cost control policies implemented in recent years in Italy have affected hospital activity. Our contribution is mainly empirical as we focus our attention on the impact that policies like hospital...

We examine the extent to which hospital technologies are associated with growth in U.S. hospital costs. We create an index capturing the availability of a range of technologies in 2214 hospitals and track over the period 1996-2007, along with financial information from Medicare Cost Reports. We...

Accounting for variation in the quality of care is a major challenge for the assessment of hospital cost performance. Because data on patients’ health improvement are generally not available, existing studies have resorted to inherently incomplete outcome measures such as mortality or...