Welfare Standards in Hospital Mergers

International Mergers: Incentive and Welfare

Information asymmetry creates value and incentives for ̄rms from di®erent countries to merge. To demonstrate this point, we develop a model of international trade under oligopolistic competition and asymmetric information, in which domestic ̄rms are informed of the local market demands, but foreign ̄rms are not. By emphasizing two features of a merger between a domestic ̄rm and a foreign ̄rm, w...

Welfare Tradeoffs in U.s. Rail Mergers

Since the publication by Williamson (1968) of his seminal paper on antitrust there has been a growing recognition by regulators of the need to assess tradeoffs between merger-related efficiency gains and merger-induced increases in market power. This paper addresses that need by presenting a structural econometric model of recent mergers in the U.S. rail industry. The paper extends the structur...

Performance Standards and Welfare Reform

Do hospital mergers reduce costs?

Proponents of hospital consolidation claim that mergers lead to significant cost savings, but there is little systematic evidence backing these claims. For a large sample of hospital mergers between 2000 and 2010, I estimate difference-in-differences models that compare cost trends at acquired hospitals to cost trends at hospitals whose ownership did not change. I find evidence of economically ...

Hospital Mergers and Economic Efficiency

Consolidation via merger both from hospital-to-hospital mergers and from hospital acquisitions of physician groups is changing the competitive landscape of the provision of health care delivery in the United States. This Article undertakes a legal and economic examination of a recent Ninth Circuit case examining the hospital acquisition of a physician group. This Article explores the Saint Alph...