Introduction The Hospital Authority (HA) is a statutory body that was established under the Hospital Authority Ordinance. It has managed public hospitals in Hong Kong since 1991. Hospitals in Hong Kong are divided into seven geographically based clusters. HA has designed a “Payfor-Performance (P4P) model” which includes incentives to promote productivity and quality. In the second year of this ...

A surgical site infection (SSI) is the most frequently acquired hospital infection in Spain, about 19.4% of all nosocomial infections. The prevalence of this adverse event is 8.01% and the total incremental cost to the total cost of the episode is about 52,5%, generating high economic impact on hospital costs and undermining the quality of care by increasing the morbidity, mortality to 11,9%, p...

In Bartling, Fehr and Schmidt (2012) we show theoretically and experimentally that it is optimal to grant discretion to workers if (i) discretion increases productivity, (ii) workers can be screened by past performance, (iii) some workers reciprocate high wages with high effort and (iv) employers pay high wages leaving rents to their workers. In this paper we show experimentally that the produc...

The relationship between productivity and biodiversity has long been an important issue in ecological research. However, in recent decades, most ecologists have primarily focused on species diversity while paying little attention to functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity (PD), especially in alpine meadow communities following fertilization. In this study, a fertilization experiment inv...

underlying representations play a crucial role in capturing predictable relations among different phonetic categories in phonological theory. Tone sandhi is a tonal alternation phenomenon in which a tone changes to a different tone in certain phonological environments. This study investigates whether Taiwanese listeners are more sensitive to the surface form of the tones or the underlying tonal...

Using panel data from a large hospital system, this paper presents estimates of the productivity effects of human capital in a team production environment. Proxying nurses’ general human capital by education and their unit-specific human capital by experience on the nursing unit, we find that greater amounts of both types of human capital significantly improve patient outcomes. Disruptions to t...

We analyze the productivity of information technology in emergency response systems. "Enhanced 911" (E911) is information technology that links caller identification to a location database and so speeds up emergency response. We assess the impact of E911 on health outcomes using Pennsylvania ambulance and hospital records between 1994 and 1996, a period of substantial adoption. We find that as ...

The problem of assessing the impact of firm entry and exit on aggregate productivity growth is addressed. The proposed method overcomes some problems with currently proposed methods. The paper also addresses some of the problems involved in aggregating outputs and inputs when firms enter and exit so that the one output and one input aggregate productivity decompositions can be applied. It turns...