The growth of managed care has prompted numerous questions about its impact on the quality of health care. This paper reviews evidence on the impacts of managed care on quality. Most comparisons of care for patients in different plans within similar markets suggests that there is little...

This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between human capital and organizational performance. We use detailed longitudinal monthly data on nursing units in the Veterans Administration hospital system to identify how the human capital (general, hospital-specific and unit or...

Rationale: Computerized patient records and bar code medication systems are gaining favor in the health care industry. These systems are believed to reduce patient care errors and improve the work environment for medical professionals, although there is little objective research on the effects...

We study the properties of two specification tests that have been applied to a variety of estimators in the context of value-added measures (VAMs) of teacher and school quality: the Hausman test for choosing between random and fixed effects and a test for feedback (sometimes called a...

School districts and state departments of education frequently must choose between a variety of methods to estimating teacher quality. This paper examines under what circumstances the decision between estimators of teacher quality is important. We examine estimates derived from growth percentile...