Context and aim: The Danish hospital sector is facing a significant rebuilding programme, driven by a political desire to concentrate activity in fewer and larger hospitals. Our aim is to analyse whether the current configuration of Danish hospitals is subject to scale economies that may justify such plans and to estimate an optimal hospital size. Methods: We estimate cost functions using panel...

Strategic positioning and potential cost savings are popular explanations for growing consolidation in the wireless telephone industry. This research estimates economies of scale for a large panel of GTE Wireless cellular market areas. Contrary to previous findings, our results indicate scale economies exist throughout the system and provide a rationale for the industry trend of consolidation.

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the e¤ects on industry performance – pro…ts, social welfare and price-cost margins –of exogenously changing the number of …rms in Cournot markets. This includes an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-o¤ between competition and production e¢ ciency. Most conventional beliefs actually require some quali…cations to be valid. Under scale...

Economies of scale in upstream production can lead both disintegrated downstream firm as well as its vertically integrated rival to outsource offshore for intermediate goods, even if offshore production has moderate cost disadvantage compared to inhouse production of the vertically integrated firm.

The efficiency of centralized delivery services over a backbone network in comparison to that of localized or multiple individual trips from the perspective of the overall carbon footprint is a fundamental subject of the analysis of logistical systems. In this paper, we quantify the changes in overall efficiency due to such services by looking at “household-level” economies of scale in transpor...

A model of international trade that resembles the classical Ricardo model but differs from it in admitting economies of scale in production is described.

This is the first paper that examines economies of scale in stock exchanges. The data employed in the study include cost and output statistics for 37 stock exchanges in four continents around the world for the year 1997. I estimate two traditional cost functions and find that ray (overall) scale economies exist only in the very large stock exchanges but that there are significant scale economie...

Subject/Research problem Hospitals traditionally segregated resources into centralized functional departments such as diagnostic departments, ambulatory care centres, and nursing wards. In recent years this organizational model has been challenged by the idea that higher quality of care and efficiency in service delivery can be achieved when services are organized around patient groups. Example...

Subject/Research problem Hospitals traditionally segregated resources into centralized functional departments such as diagnostic departments, ambulatory care centres, and nursing wards. In recent years this organizational model has been challenged by the idea that higher quality of care and efficiency in service delivery can be achieved when services are organized around patient groups. Example...

Numerous studies have investigated economies of scale and scope in higher education as a means of providing public and private providers of college and university teaching and research and their stakeholders with knowledge of the cost structures that underpin provision in this economically and socially important sector. However, debate continues on the precise nature of these economies of scale...