The analysis of efficiency in health care has largely focussed either on individual health care providers, or on sub-national health systems conceived as a unique decision-making unit. However, in hierarchically organized national health services, two separate entities are responsible for turning financial resources into services at the local level: health administrations and health care provid...

Revenue cap regulation is often combined with systematic benchmarking to reveal the managerial inefficiencies when regulating natural monopolies. One example is the European energy sector, where benchmarking methods are based on actual cost data, which are influenced by managerial inefficiency as well as operational heterogeneity. This paper demonstrates how a conditional nonparametric method, ...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...

At best, some markets can be approximately perfectly competitive. In practice, most markets deviate quite substantially from the perfectly competitive ideal. A possible policy response is to introduce regulation, in order to correct for the failures of the market. However, regulation gives rise to inefficiencies. No matter what regulatory model is chosen, there will be disadvantages. Depending ...

It is indicated that in the theory of law there are still quite relevant discussions regarding definition criteria for relationship and delimitation such categories as “mechanism legal regulation” implementation protection status a citizen”. According to separate unified approaches distinguishing categories, it emphasized that, general, mechanism regulation should be considered basic element ci...

BACKGROUND State-based laws for reporting of health care-associated infections (HAI) have developed and changed dramatically in recent years, affecting the costs of reporting and impact on infection rates. It is necessary for practitioners of infection control to understand these changing legal frameworks and their application to practice. METHODS Employing systematic state-based research, th...