a r t i c l e i n f o The objective of this paper is to analyze the efficiency consequences of monopoly from the perspective of an efficiency-wage model of unemployment based on Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984). An important feature of our model is that a firm can raise the probability that a shirking worker is detected by increasing its effort or investment in the monitoring of workers. Using this ...

We present a new framework for assessing the effects of hospital closures on social welfare and the local economy. While patient welfare necessarily declines when patients lose access to a hospital, closures also tend to reduce costs. We study five hospital closures in two states and find that urban hospital bailouts reduce aggregate social welfare: on balance, the cost savings from closures mo...

There is a need to accurately account for the contributions of environmental assets to the overall economy. Such accounting would permit policies that allow protection of important natural resources and aid the analytic process to determine an accurate basis for a sustainable economy. The aim is to develop an accounting framework for ecology that is sufficiently consistent with the economic fra...

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...

Most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non-parametric frontier methods. The choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate, with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non-parametric approach. The aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier met...

This paper argues that, from the viewpoint of Pareto optimality, the industries with increasing returns are under-expanded relative to those without increasing returns and those with higher degrees of increasing returns are under-expanded relative to those with lower degrees. Ignoring administrative and indirect (such as rent-seeking) costs, subsidies on goods produced under conditions of (high...

A framework for the optimal taxation of cigarettes based on economic efficiency is provided here. Fundamentally different views of smoking in the context of addictive behavior result in markedly different estimates of the efficient cigarette tax rate. Based on the rational addiction model, more than half of the states may have increased their cigarette excise tax rates to levels beyond the econ...