This paper explores the cost structure of Swiss hospitals, focusing on differences due to teaching activities and those across different ownership and subsidization types. A stochastic total cost frontier with a Cobb-Douglas functional form has been estimated for a panel of 150 general hospitals over the six-year period from 1998 and 2003. Inpatient cases adjusted by DRG cost weights and...
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Adequate and timely application of analgesics after surgical operations is important from both clinical and economic perspectives. Administering pain relief measures requires information about development of post-operative pain and the effect of analgesics. Such information can be obtained from studying patients’ perception of pain in different periods after the operation. This paper applies an...
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This paper is a case study of the use of public use administrative data for the estimation of empirical relations when key dependent variables are not available in the data. It is shown that the out-of-hospital mortality rates can be identified using the patient discharge data without post-discharge death records. Using data on the lengths of hospitalizations and out-of-hospital spells, the...
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This paper analyses the demand of Swiss families for child care facilities. A choice experiment has been used to study the effects of the facilities’ characteristics as well as socioeconomic factors on the selected child care mode. The experimental data have been analysed using a discrete choice model with multinomial logit specification. The results suggest that the stated demand for...
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This paper examines the application of different parametric methods to measure cost efficiency of electricity distribution utilities. The cost frontier model is estimated using four methods: Displaced Ordinary Least Squares, Fixed Effects, Random Effects and Maximum Likelihood Estimation. These methods are applied to a sample of 59 distribution utilities in Switzerland. The data consist of an...
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This paper examines the issue of cost-efficiency in Switzerland’s nursing homes, an issue of concern to policy makers because of the rapid growth of elderly care expenditure and the aging of the population. The fact that nursing homes in Switzerland exist in different institutional forms, private for-profit, government and non-profit status, raises the issue of their relative cost efficiency. A...
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This paper examines the effects of hospital conversions between For-Profit and Not-For-Profit forms on quality of medical care. The sample includes Medicare patients treated in California’s private hospitals from 1990 to 1998 for Acute Myocardial Infarction and Congestive Heart Failure. The results suggest that converted hospitals have experienced quality changes before conversion, which may...
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This paper studies a number of stochastic cost frontier models comparing their ability to distinguish unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency variation among firms. The main focus is on the panel data models that incorporate firm-specific effects in a stochastic frontier framework, as proposed by Greene (2002, 2004). In cases where the unobserved heterogeneity is correlated with some of the...
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This paper examines the performance of several panel data models to measure cost and scale efficiency in network industries. Network industries are characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity, much of which is network-specific and unobserved. The unaccounted-for heterogeneity can create bias in the inefficiency estimates. The stochastic frontier models that include additional firm-specific...
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This paper examines the productive efficiency of the hospital sector in Switzerland. A panel data of 214 general hospitals over the four-year period between 1998 and 2001 has been analyzed. A descriptive analysis of the data casts some light on differences across hospital types especially regarding case mix severity and length of hospitalizations. The final sample used for the cost frontier...
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