hospital

We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry

Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.

More Than 20 Years of Consolidation Have Led to a Dysfunctional Health Care Market

The US health care system is based on markets, which do not function as well as they could, or should. Prices are...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Free Money, Hospitals, and Private Equity Firms

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean. 

The Case for Lockdown: in Italy’s Lombardy, It Can Reduce Covid-19 Potential Fatalities from 160,000 to 25,000

According to an analysis by Bocconi University professor Carlo Favero, the number of people infected with the coronavirus in Lombardy, Northern Italy, is 120,000, while...

The Fight Against Coronavirus: What the US Can Learn from Italian Hospitals on How to Prevent a Disaster

In a Facebook post that has since become viral, Italian doctor Daniele Macchini offered a first-hand testimony from the Lombardy region, the epicenter of...

The Real Price of Health Data: Americans Don’t Want to Share Their Records for Free

The 2019 Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index survey shows that 93 percent of participants don’t want to share their health data with digital...

Hospital Mergers: The Forgotten Problem of American Health Care

In the US, there are more than 100 hospital mergers every year. This increasing concentration does not lead to the promised savings, nor to...

LATEST NEWS

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.