The impact of competition on management quality
Subtitle: evidence from public hospitals
By: Nicholas Bloom ... [et al.].
Contributors: National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 16032; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 16032.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] :
Description: "The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.  In this paper we examine the causal impact of competition on management quality.  We analyze the hospital sector where geographic proximity is a key determinant of competition, and English public hospitals where political competition can be used to construct instrumental variables for market structure.  Since almost all major English hospitals are government run, closing hospitals in areas where the governing party has a small majority is rare due to fear of electoral punishment.  We find that management quality - measured using a new survey tool - is strongly correlated with financial and clinical outcomes such as survival rates from emergency heart attack admissions (AMI).  More importantly, we find that higher competition (as indicated by a greater number of neighboring hospitals) is positively correlated with increased management quality, and this relationship strengthens when we instrument the number of local hospitals with local political competition.  Adding another rival hospital increases the index of management quality by one third of a standard deviation and leads to a 10.7% reduction in heart-attack mortality rates"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 6/15/2010.

Includes bibliographical references.

Also available in print.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.