French and US hospital technologies are compared using directional input distance functions. The aggregation properties of the directional distance function allow comparison of hospital industry-level performance as well as standard firm-level performance with regard to productive efficiency. In...

This paper estimates the total factor productivity of the Italian health care sector using a modified bootstrapped Malmquist Index including the quality of the production process provided to the population. Decomposing the productivity process in three different components (efficiency change,...

Hospital productivity has been a research topic for over two decades. Whereas much has been learned regarding cost, technical, scale, and allocative efficiency as well as the impact that weakly disposable inputs/outputs have on hospital behavior, we expand on this research by examining size and...

Authors of past studies focusing on returns to scale in hospitals proffered mixed results. These seemingly contradictory findings have probably arisen due to different methodological approaches (parametric or non parametric), different aggregation levels of analysis (hospital/department/units),...

Uncompensated care can create financial difficulties for hospitals. The problem is likely to worsen as the number of individuals lacking health insurance continues to grow. The objective of this study is to measure how uncompensated care affects hospitals' ability to provide the services for...