Università della Svizzera italiana

Effects of ownership, subsidization and teaching activities on hospital costs in Switzerland

Farsi, Mehdi ; Filippini, Massimo

In: Health economics, 2008, vol. 17, no. 3, p. 335-350

This paper explores the cost structure of Swiss hospitals, focusing on differences due to teaching activities and those related to ownership and subsidization types. A stochastic total cost frontier with a Cobb-Douglas functional form has been estimated for a panel of 148 general hospitals over the six-year period from 1998 to 2003. Inpatient cases adjusted by DRG cost weights and ambulatory...

Università della Svizzera italiana

The temporal variation of cost-efficiency in Switzerland’s hospitals : an application of mixed models

Farsi, Mehdi

In: Journal of Productivity Analysis, 2008, p. -

This paper uses a mixed effects model to examine the temporal variation of cost efficiency in Switzerland’s general hospitals. The variations in total costs, the number of empty beds and the length of hospital stays are analyzed using financial data from a sample of 168 hospitals operating from 1998 to 2003, as well as hospitalization records disaggregated to Diagnosis Related Groups....

Università della Svizzera italiana

The temporal variation of cost-efficiency in Switzerland’s hospitals : an application of mixed models

Farsi, Mehdi

This paper examines the temporal variation of cost efficiency in Switzerland’s general hospitals. The variation of total costs and the number of empty beds has been analyzed using a sample of 168 hospitals operating from 1998 to 2003. In addition more than 100,000 observations form the inpatient data disaggregated to DRG categories have been used to analyze the variations in the length of...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Efficiency measurement in network industries : application to the Swiss railway companies

Farsi, Mehdi ; Filippini, Massimo ; Greene, William

In: Journal of Regulatory Economics, 2005, vol. 28, no. 1, p. 69-90

The persistence of increasingly high government subsidies in Switzerland’s railroads has led the federal and cantonal authorities to discussing the possibility of high-powered incentive contracts such as those based on cost efficiency benchmarking. Railways are however, characterized by a high degree of unobserved heterogeneity that could bias the efficiency estimates. This paper examines the...