This paper considers the role of ownership form for the financial performance of German acute care hospitals and its development over time. We measure financial performance by a hospital-specific yearly probability of default (PD). Using a panel of hospital data, our models allow for state dependence in the PD as well as unobserved individual heterogeneity. We find that private ownership is mor...

BACKGROUND A growing number of German hospitals have been privatized with the intention of increasing cost effectiveness and improving the quality of health care. Numerous studies investigated what possible qualitative and economic consequences these changes issues might have on patient care.However, little is known about how this privatization trend relates to physicians' working conditions an...

The new Physician Payments Sunshine Act requires public reporting of payments to physicians and teaching hospitals from pharmaceutical and medical device companies, as well as reporting of certain ownership interests (see box). Sponsored by Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Herb Kohl (D-WI) and supported by consumer advocates, the law covers meals, honoraria, travel expenses, and grants from...

With a framework of incomplete contract, this paper shows that for provision of public goods such as Medicare and education, pure privatization can’t promote competition. On the contrary, the co-existence of public and private provision can enhance de facto competition. Two competitive effects are identified. When consumers are heterogeneous, the co-existence of public and private ownership giv...

Analysis of the equity premium puzzle has focused on private-sector capital markets. However, the existence of an anomalous equity premium raises important issues in the evaluation of public-sector investment projects. These issues are explored below. We begin by formalizing the argument that an equity premium may arise from uninsurable systematic risk in labour income, and show that, other thi...

The German hospital market has been subject over the past two decades to a variety of healthcare reforms. Particularly the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) in 2004 aimed to increase efficiency of hospitals. The objective of the paper is to review recent studies comparing the efficiency of German public, private non-profit and private for-profit hospitals. The results of the studi...

conclusions the overall results indicated that bacteriophages isolated from sewage exhibited excellent lytic activity against mrsa strains. in conclusion, bacteriophages can be further characterized and appear to be a promising candidate for phage therapy against mrsa in the future. results the phages exhibited good lytic activity against mrsa when tested in-vitro, and the highest activity was ...