capital structure ownership and capital payment policy the case of hospitals this study examines effects of pertinent features of hospital capital payment policies on hospital capital structure decisions in a one period stochastic value maximization model separate models are developed for for profit and not for profit hospitals hospital debt to assets ratios are analyzed empirically using a cross section of data from the american hospital association although the effect on capital structure of hospital reliance on cost based reimbursement cannot be signed theoretically in both for profit and not for profit cases a higher cost based share leads to higher leverage factors associated with high bankruptcy risk e g earnings volatility cause hospitals to take on less debt the hospital industry exhibits two prominent characteristics that have unique implications for its capital structure first the majority of hospitals are organized as private not for profit nfp institutions since there is no applicable corporate income tax any risk of bankruptcy might imply that the nfp hospital would select an all equity hospital structure yet it is a stylized fact that almost all nfp hospitals have debt obligations at the same time there exists a sizeable minority of hospitals operated by government or as for profit organizations forprofit hospitals are subject to all tax privileges and obligations applicable to forprofit enterprises in other sectors thus the industry provides a laboratory for analysis of the effect of ownership on organizations capital structures a second unique feature of the industry is that almost all hospital revenue is derived from public and private insurers waldo et al 21 at least until very recently insurers in this industry paid hospitals on either a retrospective cost or

the design of the university system abstract this paper compares the organisation of the university sector under unregulated private provision with the structure which would be chosen by a welfare maximising government it studies a general equilibrium model where students attend university to earn higher incomes in the labour market and universities teach them and carry out research each university chooses its tuition fee to maximise the amount of resources it can devote to research research bestows an externality on society government intervention needs to balance labour market efficiency considerations which would tend to equalise the number of students attending each university with considerations of efficiency on the production side which suggest that the most productive universities should teach more students and carry out more research we find that government concentrates research more that the private market would but less than it would like to do if it had perfect information about the productivity of universities it also allows fewer universities than would operate in a private system

the supply of charity services by nonprofit hospitals motives and market structure this article studies provision of charity care by private nonprofit hospitals we demonstrate that in the absence of large positive income effects on charity care supply convex preferences for the nonprofit hospital imply crowding out by other private or government hospitals extending our model to include impure altruism rivalry provides a possible explanation for the previously reported empirical result that both crowding out and income effects on indigent care supply are often weak or insignificant empirical analysis of data for hospitals in maryland provides evidence of rivalry on the supply of charity care

common property resources storage facilities and ownership structures a cournot model of the oil market during the last decade economists have tried hard to convince meadows and his followers that market forces do not tend to exhaust our natural resources too rapidly as compared with the requirements of an intertemporal pareto optimum it is well known now that under well defined property rights and correct price expectations a competitive extraction industry brings about a pareto optimal depletion path and it has been shown that oligopolistic and monopolistic market structures may even produce a bias towards conservation 1 it is still an unresolved issue however which extraction path will result if property rights are imperfectly defined following the pioneering work of gordon 1954 there has been a large body of literature demonstrating that in the extreme case of free entry and myopic profit maximization there are strong reasons for excessive extraction 2 but this literature hardly yields reliable conclusions for the perhaps more realistic case where firms derive their behaviour from intertemporal optimization and where there is a common ownership but limited access to the resource the basic intuition behind the common pool problem is that the individual agent chooses an extraction policy other than the one he would choose under well defined property rights since he is afraid that part of the resource he leaves underground will be extracted and sold by others 3 despite the simplicity of this intuition there does not seem to be any publication that analyses it within an intertemporal equilibrium model with rational and far sighted agents this is the motivation for the present approach the approach studies the common pool problem in the context of an oligopolistic world market for oil it posits a given number of identical firms extracting oil from holdings between some of which there is mutual seepage the firms sell the extracted oil in the same market or they store it in privately owned seepage proof tanks each firm derives its behaviour from intertemporal optimization under perfect foresight of the time paths of the model variables but cournotesque conjectures about the reactions of its competitors except for the assumption of storage facilities this specification is closely related to models previously studied by khalatbari 1977 and kemp and long 1980 essay 10 4 the two models are very similar but they yield strikingly different conclusions while kemp and long find that the extraction path chosen by the firms is pareto optimal i e that the price of the resource rises at a rate given by the market rate of interest khalatbari contends that there is over extraction kemp and long convincingly demonstrate that khalatbari s model suffers from an inconsistency in the way the individual firm expects its rivals to respond to its own actions and they argue that this inconsistency is the reason for the divergence in results thus the casual reader gets the

hospital profits the effects of reimbursement policies this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of cost based reimbursement cbr on hospital costs and charges it takes issue with previous analyses which have treated cbr as paying economic costs plus a mark up and have concluded that the mark up is too small to significantly distort hospital decision making the basic thesis here is that if reimbursement is based on costs accounting costs become a price to cost paying patients and will be optimized to maximize revenue a hospital serving both cost and charge paying private patients can set two price schedules accounting profits ratio of charges to costs are not a measure of economic profit but of relative prices to these two groups of patients in the absence of constraints from regulation or patient co payment the optimum level of accounting costs would be infinite in practice the medicare reimbursement formula links allowable costs to charges received from charge paying patients this formula creates incentives for the hospital to raise charges above the single price profit maximizing monopoly level this inflationary effect of the medicare formula does not presuppose that medicare pays less than full cost the empirical analysis of hospital laboratory costs and charges generally supports the predictions for other departments the conclusions are consistent but more tentative because of data limitations overall evidence suggests minimal cross subsidy between cost and charge paying patients comparisons of cost and charge levels in for profit voluntary non profit and government hospitals are presented but it is emphasized that inferences about relative efficiency and profitability cannot be drawn from accounting data given the incentives created by cbr

booms and busts in the uk housing market the often volatile behaviour of uk house prices between 1957 and 1994 is analysed in an annual econometric model theory suggests that financial liberalisation of mortgage markets in the 1980s should have led to notable shifts in house price behaviour the evidence supports the predictions of theory suggesting shifts took place in wealth effects as in the consumption function and that real interest rates and income expectations became more important the presence of transactions costs suggests important nonlinearities in house price dynamics the paper also contains an explicit econometric treatment of expectations demography supply spillovers from the rented sector and of composition biases in the official house price index

enter at your own risk hmo participation and enrollment in the medicare risk market we examine hmo participation and enrollment in the medicare risk market for the years 1990 to 1995 we develop a profit maximization model of hmo behavior which explicitly considers potential linkages between an hmo s production decision in the commercial enrollee market and its participation and production decisions in the medicare risk market our results suggest that the payment rate is a primary determinant of hmo participation while the price of a supplemental medicare insurance policy positively affects hmo medicare enrollment we also find empirical support for the existence of complementarities in the joint production of an hmo s commercial and medicare products

determinants of interest rates on tax exempt hospital bonds abstract the aim of this paper is to examine the determinants of interest rates on tax exempt hospital bonds the results highlight the potential and actual roles of federal and state policy in the determination of these rates the shift to a prospective payment system under medicare has subsidized the borrowing costs of some hospitals at the expense of others the selection of underwriters by negotiation rather than by competitive bidding results in higher interest rates the federal tax of 1986 raised the cost of hospital debt by encouraging bond issues to contain call features

cartel stability in an exhaustible resource model a simple oligopolistic common pool exhaustible resource game is considered by analysing punishment strategies including optimal punishments it is possible to determine which cartel agreements are implementable in a non cooperative play of the game joint profit maximizing allocations are sustainable for sufficiently low discounting but in general it is shown that no folk theorem exists for this model in particular for sufficiently high elasticities of demand it is shown that optimal punishments are not sufficiently severe to enforce most stationary symmetric extraction paths thus confirming the hypothesis that sufficient market power is needed for a cartel to be stable a simple common property exhaustible resource model in a discrete time infinite horizon framework will be considered by looking at punishments levelled against firms that deviate from an implicitly agreed extraction path it is possible to examine the extent to which different allocations can be supported as non cooperative equilibria we shall pay particular attention to the question of whether punishments can be severe enough to sustain implicit agreements that maximize joint profits and to the idea pindyck 1979 that cartel stability depends crucially upon market power this non cooperative approach to the question of cartel stability has been used by porter 1983 in a repeated oligopoly model with imperfect information see also green and porter 1984 while we assume perfect observability here the model is compli cated by the existence of a state variable in the form of the resource stock moreover we shall apply the idea of optimal punishments in this dynamic model abreu et al 1986 1990 have looked at general properties of the equilibrium set in the green porter model what we find is that by considering a more general strategy space than that conventionally studied cooperative extraction rates are sustainable in equilibrium for low enough discount rates in contrast to the over extraction results often obtained moreover in this model the predictions concerning the range of possible sustainable equilibria as the discount rate approaches zero are sharp while the cooperative solution belongs to the set of equilibria for low discount rates constant symmetric extraction paths below the maximum possible rate fail to be sustainable in the limit if the elasticity of demand is sufficiently high thus for low discount rates only extraction rates close to the cooperative rate are sustainable together with disagreement equilibria which involve very high extraction rates these results are in sharp contrast to those obtained from repeated games where in the limit the range of equilibria is very large the difference is explained by the existence of a state variable in the form of a declining stock of the resource these results are also in contrast to what can happen in our model when the demand elasticity is lower all constant symmetric extraction paths may be sustainable for low enough

forecasting us real house price returns over 1831 2013 evidence from copula models given the existence of nonnormality and nonlinearity in the data generating process of real house price returns over the period of 1831 2013 this article compares the ability of various univariate copula models relative to standard benchmarks naive and autoregressive models in forecasting real us house price over the annual out of sample period of 1874 2013 based on an in sample of 1831 1873 overall our results provide overwhelming evidence in favour of the copula models normal student s t clayton frank gumbel joe and ali mikhail huq relative to linear benchmarks and especially for the student s t copula which outperforms all other models both in terms of in sample and out of sample predictability results our results highlight the importance of accounting for nonnormality and nonlinearity in the data generating process of real house price returns for the us economy for nearly two centuries of data

on the existence of an optimal capital structure theory and evidence one of the most contentious issues in the theory of finance during the past quarter century has been the theory of capital structure the geneses of this controversy were the seminal contributions by modigliani and miller 18 19 the general academic view by the mid 1970s although not a consensus was that the optimal capital structure involves balancing the tax advantage of debt against the present value of bankruptcy costs no sooner did this general view become prevalent in the profession than miller 16 presented a new challenge by showing that under certain conditions the tax advantage of debt financing at the firm level is exactly offset by the tax disadvantage of debt at the personal level since then there has developed a burgeoning theoretical literature attempting to reconcile miller s model with the balancing theory of optimal capital structure e g deangelo and masulis 5 kim 12 and modigliani 17 the general result of this work is that if there are significant leverage related costs such as bankruptcy costs agency costs of debt and loss of non debt tax shields and if the income from equity is untaxed then the marginal bondholder s tax rate will be less than the corporate rate and there will be a positive net tax advantage to corporate debt financing the firm s optimal capital structure will involve the trade off between the tax advantage of debt and various leverage related costs the upshot of these extensions of miller s model is the recognition that the existence of an optimal capital structure is essentially an empirical issue as to whether or not the various leverage related costs are economically significant enough to influence the costs of corporate borrowing the miller model and its theoretical extensions have inspired several timeseries studies which provide evidence on the existence of leverage related costs trczinka 28 reports that from examining differences in average yields between taxable corporate bonds and tax exempt municipal bonds one cannot reject the miller hypothesis that the marginal bondholder s tax rate is not different from the corporate tax rate however trczinka is careful to point out that this finding does not necessarily imply that there is no tax advantage of corporate debt if the personal tax rate on equity is positive indeed buser and hess 1 using a longer time series of data and more sophisticated econometric techniques estimate that the average effective personal tax rate on equity is statistically positive and is not of a trivial magnitude more importantly they document evidence that is consistent with the existence of significant leverage related costs in the economy

debt investment and endowment accumulation the case of not for profit hospitals abstract not for profit hospitals benefit from special tax rules that allow state authorities to issue tax exempt bonds on their behalf which may affect their investment and financing choices hospitals may respond by increasing their investment in physical assets however they may also engage in tax arbitrage by using the tax exempt debt while maintaining endowment assets the paper combines data from tax information returns and the annual survey of hospitals by the american hospital association for 1993 1996 overall the results are consistent with substantial tax planning by not for profit hospitals of the us 55 9 billion in tax exempt liabilities of hospitals in 1996 as much as us 32 6 billion could have been eliminated if hospitals spent their endowments instead of borrowing furthermore controlling for hospital size in terms of revenues and operating assets endowment assets are associated with a higher ratio of tax exempt or total debt to operating assets in contrast endowment assets are not related to taxable debt suggesting that the effects of the endowment on borrowing are motivated by tax incentives investment and endowment accumulation regressions suggest that increases in debt increase both physical investment and endowment accumulation but these effects are concentrated among cash rich hospitals for which the effects on endowment accumulation effects are larger than the effects on physical investment

pricing behavior of non profit agencies the case of blood products abstract in this study we examine the pricing behavior of a non profit agency the american national red cross blood service units two alternative hypotheses are presented one in which the agency maximizes profits and one in which output is maximized subject to a breakeven constraint following a general approach developed by eckstein and fromm pricing equations for separate blood products are applied to cross sectional data from red cross blood centers to determine the impact of demand cost competition and subsidy variables the impact of these variables in particular the impact of the fixed subsidy on price is shown to be consistent with the output maximizing model

the changing effects of competition on non profit and for profit hospital pricing behavior abstract has the nature of hospital competition changed from a medical arms race in which hospitals compete for patients by offering their doctors high quality services to a price war for the patients of payors this paper uses time series cross sectional methods on california hospital discharge data from 1986 1994 to show the association of hospital prices with measures of market concentration changed steadily over this period with prices now higher in less competitive areas even for non profit hospitals regression results are used to simulate the price impact of hypothetical hospital mergers

deal structuring in philanthropic venture capital investments financing instrument valuation and covenants philanthropic venture capital phvc is a financing option available for social enterprises that like traditional venture capital provides capital and value added services to portfolio organizations differently from venture capital phvc has an ethical dimension as it aims at maximizing the social return on the investment this article examines the deal structuring phase of phvc investments in terms of instrument used from equity to grant valuation and covenants included in the contractual agreement by content analyzing a set of semi structured interviews and thereafter surveying the entire population of phvc funds that are active in europe and in the united states findings indicate that the non distribution constraint holding for non profit social enterprises is an effective tool to align the interests of both investor and investee this makes the investor behaving as a steward rather than as a principal conversely while backing non profit social ventures philanthropic venture capitalists structure their deal similarly as traditional venture capital as the absence of the non distribution constraint makes such investments subject to moral hazard risk both in terms of perks and stealing and social impact focus

forecasting house prices for the four census regions and the aggregate us economy in a data rich environment this article considers the ability of large scale involving 145 fundamental variables time series models estimated by dynamic factor analysis and bayesian shrinkage to forecast real house price growth rates of the four us census regions and the aggregate us economy besides the standard minnesota prior we also use additional priors that constrain the sum of coefficients of the var models we compare 1 to 24 months ahead forecasts of the large scale models over an out of sample horizon of 1995 01 2009 03 based on an in sample of 1968 02 1994 12 relative to a random walk model a small scale var model comprising just the five real house price growth rates and a medium scale var model containing 36 of the 145 fundamental variables besides the five real house price growth rates in addition to the forecast comparison exercise across small medium and large scale models we also look at the ability of the optimal model i e the model that produces the minimum average mean squared forecast error f

on the oligopolistic extraction of non renewable common pool resources in recent literature the extraction of common pool resources ha s been discussed under the aspect of whether or not they can be used efficiently when a finite number of agents has access to the resource the objective of this paper is the derivation of a necessary equilibrium condition in a simple model this condition has severe consequences for existence propositions in papers of m c kemp and n v long 1980 j mcmillan and h w sinn 1984 and j f reinganum and n l stokey 1985 copyright 1986 by the review of economic studies limited

efficiency inducing tax for a common property oligopoly the author characterizes the markov perfect tax that induces a common property oligopoly to extract efficiently a nonrenewable resource for linear and isoelastic demand he provides closed form expressions of the unique specific tax industry profits may be higher or lower in the oligopoly with the tax relative to the competitive equilibrium with property rights for linear or isoelastic demand there exists no feasible open loop tax that induces efficient extraction in this case the policymaker gains no advantage from being able to make binding commitments copyright 1992 by royal economic society

quality and outside capacity in the provision of health services abstract this paper studies the effects of non contractibility of investment on the choices made by a health authority and a hospital which supplies a specific service non contractibility determines inefficiencies compared with any pareto efficient outcome the quality of the service chosen by the hospital is too low and the health authority relies too much on outside providers

rate of return regulation and utility capital structure decisions a corporation s capital structure is a means for partitioning its return stream among different classes of securityholders and across different states of nature the primary thrust of capital structure theory has been to determine whether and how this partitioning affects the total value of the firm 1 for a firm subject to rate of return regulation however the capital structure decision may take on an additional dimension under such regulation the firm s output price is set by an outside agency so as to yield a fair return to providers of capital and if effective this process reduces monopoly profits but if the regulator s price setting rule depends on the firm s capital structure in some predictable way the firm may be able to influence price and hence reap additional profits by judiciously choosing its financing mix the purpose of this paper is to analyze possible price influence effects of a regulated firm s capital structure and to illustrate regulators attempts to combat them the determinants of a regulated firm s capital structure have been touched upon in previous papers gordon 8 elton and gruber 5 gordon and mccallum 9 jaffe and mandelker 11 meyer 14 and sherman 24 for example but that issue has not been their primary concern the present paper differs from those mentioned above by focusing its attention more directly on the capital structure decision this issue is of interest in its own right in view of the important position occupied by regulated firms securities in the capital market but the approach taken here also serves to highlight and extend some common threads in the previous papers in particular the results of these papers emerge as straightforward applications of the price influence principle and differences among them can be attributed to differing perceptions of the regulator s pricesetting behavior section i of the paper discusses the price influence principle in general terms and describes the circumstances under which it will alter a regulated firm s financing choice section ii presents three illustrations of how the general principle might work in practice depending on the price setting behavior of the regulatory agency section iii discusses regulators attempts to thwart the priceinfluence effect and conclusions are drawn in section iv

behavioural differences among hospitals it is ownership or location by about 1988 the consensus among leading health economists was that no meaningful differences existed among hospitals of differences owernership form and this position was embraced by the antitrust division of the us department of justice but behavioural differences among hospitals of different among hospitals of different owernership has continued to be a matter of both academic and judicial interest recent empirical studies have concluded that real differences do exist while many earlier studies reached the opposite conclusion this contradiction in finding over time as competition intensified is exactly opposite to what expense preference theory would predict we examine this apparent paradox using a very general test of behavioural differences by hospital ownership we find that the omission of location specific variables can lead to biased estimates of ownership effects and that no significant behavioural differences exist among private california hospitals in 1986 90 when this source of o

persistence mean reversion and non linearities in the us housing prices over 1830 2013 abstractthe objective of this study is to provide a direct estimate of the degree of persistence of measures of nominal and real house prices for the us economy covering the longest possible annual sample of data namely 1830 2013 the estimation of the degree of persistence accommodates for non linear deterministic trends using chebyshev polynomials in time in general the results show a high degree of persistence in the series along with a component of non linear behaviour in general if we assume uncorrelated errors non linearities are observed in both nominal and real prices but this hypothesis is rejected in favour of linear models for the log transformation of the data however if autocorrelated errors are permitted non linearities are observed in all cases and mean reversion is found in the case of logged prices though given the wide confidence intervals the unit root null hypothesis cannot be rejected in these cases

cost of capital to the hospital sector this paper provides estimates of the cost of equity and debt capital to for profit and non profit hospitals in the u s for the years 1972 83 the cost of equity is estimated using alternatively the capital asset pricing model and arbitrage pricing theory we find that the cost of equity capital using either model substantially exceeded anticipated inflation the cost of debt capital was much lower accounting for the corporate tax shield on debt and capital paybacks by cost based insurers lowered the net cost of capital to hospitals

hospital investment decisions and the cost of capital this study addresses two issues conceptually and empirically how does hospital ownership type affect hospital investment choices how do differences in the way hospitals are paid cost versus charge based reimbursement affect hospital investment the authors compute cost of capital measures for both for profit and not for profit hospitals whether or not hospital dependence on cost based payment stimulates investment depends on the generosity of such payment relative to the economic cost of capital empirically they find that for profit hospital exit entry decisions are guided by the generosity of payment to a greater extent than the not for profits copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

tax exempt debt and the capital structure of nonprofit organizations an application to hospitals the availability of tax exempt financing provides nonprofit np organizations with their own tax based incentives to issue debt in this article we develop a theoretical model in which nps gain an indirect arbitrage from tax exempt debt issuance constrained by 1 the requirement that fixed investment exceed tax exempt debt flows the project financing constraint and 2 the constraint against share issuance these constraints cause them to impute tax benefits to projects that afford access to the tax exempt bond market empirical tests indicate that np hospitals behave as if they have target levels of tax exempt debt debt targeting is constrained by the availability of capital projects while excess debt capacity stimulates investment financial theorists have generally been reluctant to apply the tenets of corporate finance to nonprofit institutions in particular there has been little or no follow up to the important work of fama and jensen on the relationships between agency contracting and ownership written over a decade ago current understanding of the financial basis and behaviors of nonprofit institutions is limited to three basic insights provided by their prior work 1 the attenuation of residual claims characteristic of nonprofit organizations addresses the agency problems associated with private donations fama and jensen 1983b 2 like other organizations nonprofits require decision systems that separate the processes of management and control fama and jensen 1983a and 3 given certain preconditions investment opportunities available to nonprofits can be evaluated with the net present value rule using discount rates defined by outside capital markets fama and jensen 1985 these observations comprise much of what is currently known about nonprofit corporate financial behavior foremost among the set of unresolved issues is the theory of debt issuance by nonprofits an area not explicitly addressed by the fama and jensen

appropriation of common access natural resources through exploration the relevance of the open loop concept in this paper the open loop equilibrium is rehabilitated as a sensible concept for analyzing common property situations in a model of natur al resource exploration in which the sole motivation to explore prior to extraction arises from a strategic incentive to preempt competito rs a consistency rule to the exploration game is applied under which the commonality of reserves is preserved even if strategies are open loop under this rule the so often claimed efficiency of the common property open loop equilibrium is lost copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

housing and the great depression this article considers the structural stability of the relationship between the real housing price and real gdp per capita for an annual sample that includes the great depression we test for structural change in parameter values using a sample of annual us data from 1890 to 1952 the article examines the long run and short run dynamic relationships between the real housing price and real gdp per capita to determine whether these relationships experienced structural change over the sample period we find that temporal granger causality exists between these two variables only for subsamples that include the great depression for the other subsample periods as well as for the entire sample period no relationship exists between these variables

dynamic demand and noncompetitive intertemporal output adjustments abstract this paper integrates dynamics on the demand and on the supply side which are characteristic for many goods in particular fuels due to costly adjustments furthermore firms often pursue a quantity strategy and decide on output adjustments additional capacities etc instead of fixing prices e g opec moved from posting prices to adjusting output in 1986 this paper provides a corresponding framework surprisingly ignored in the literature and derives intertemporal market equilibria cooperative and noncooperative in open loop and in markov strategies the equilibrium in markov strategies is different mostly opposite to the much discussed sticky price models the qualitative properties are non trivial and some of them are even surprising e g increased demand sluggishness can raise supply

do financial variables help forecasting inflation and real activity in the euro area abstract this paper uses a large data set consisting of 447 monthly macroeconomic time series concerning the main countries of the euro area to simulate out of sample predictions of the euro area industrial production and the harmonized inflation index and to evaluate the role of financial variables in forecasting we considered two models which allow forecasting based on large panels of time series forni et al rev econom statist 82 2000 540 mimeo 2001b and stock and watson mimeo 1999 performance of both models were compared to that of a simple univariate ar model results show that multivariate methods outperform univariate methods for forecasting inflation at one three six and twelve months and industrial production at one and three months we find that financial variables do help forecasting inflation but do not help forecasting industrial production

the out of sample forecasting performance of nonlinear models of regional housing prices in the us this article provides out of sample forecasts of linear and nonlinear models of us and four census subregions housing prices the forecasts include the traditional point forecasts but also include interval and density forecasts of the housing price distributions the nonlinear smooth transition autoregressive model outperforms the linear autoregressive model in point forecasts at longer horizons but the linear autoregressive and nonlinear smooth transition autoregressive models perform equally at short horizons in addition we generally do not find major differences in performance for the interval and density forecasts between the linear and nonlinear models finally in a dynamic 25 step ex ante and interval forecasting design we once again do not find major differences between the linear and nonlinear models in sum we conclude that when forecasting regional housing prices in the united states generally the additional costs associated with nonlinear forecasts outweigh the benefits for forecast

an international comparison of hospital efficiency does institutional environment matter the consensus among many health economists is that no meaningful performance differences exist among for profit and non profit hospitals in the us but this topic has continued to be a matter of academic judicial and public policy interest a similar debate has ensued internationally regarding the potential efficiency gains from privatization of public enterprises in this paper we examine empirical evidence from the public highly regulated norwegian hospital sector and the private highly competitive and unregulated california hospital sector to ascertain whether institutional environment and level of market competition significantly affect the degree of productive efficiency in hospitals we compare and discuss the productive efficiency of four similar sets of hospitals operating in different institutional and competitive environments the four samples are carefully matched in the dimensions of sample size hospital size and average lengths of stay heterogeneity in output definition is used to co

oligopoly extraction of a common property natural resource the importance of the period of commitment in dynamic games the theory of noncooperative dynamic games has provided an extremely powerful framework for studying many of the classic questions in industrial organization for example questions about resource extraction advertising research and development investment in new capacity and barriers to entry where interactions over time among few firms are involved however an important methodological issue arises when economic competition over time is modeled as a dynamic game the issue is the appropriate formulation of the players strategy spaces

the effects of for profit status and system membership on the financial performance of hospitals this research examines whether for profit status or system membership is significantly related to the financial performance of hospitals panel data containing 573 observations of florida hospitals for 1984 through 1987 are used in a fixed effects regression model the results indicate that it is system membership rather than forprofit status that is significantly related to better financial performance for profit status is unrelated to overall financial performance system hospitals have higher revenues per admission but not higher expenditures per admission than independent hospitals the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that expanding hospital systems target locations and services that are potentially profitable