The Focus Efficiency of U.S. Hospitals

Hospital productivity has been a research topic for over two decades. Whereas much has been learned regarding cost, technical, scale, and allocative efficiency as well as the impact that weakly disposable inputs/outputs have on hospital behavior, we expand on this research by examining size and service offering, or focus, efficiency at the metropolitan area level for US hospitals. By using an extension of the Free Coordination Hull (FCH), we are able to determine whether hospitals in our sample could become more efficient if they provided more services (reduce inefficiency due to too narrow a focus) or fewer services (reduce inefficiency due to too broad a focus). Our results suggest that findings vary among the hospital markets. This approach could be used by policy makers and managers in order to reduce costs by sharing services, reducing services in hospitals, or expanding services in hospitals. Findings from a study such as this should aid reform programs by providing more information on the sources of hospital inefficiency.     

The Minimal Entropy Martingale Measure (MEMM) for a Markov-Modulated Exponential Lévy Model

This paper deals with the characterization problem of the minimal entropy martingale measure (MEMM) for a Markov-modulated exponential Lévy model. This model is characterized by the presence of a background process modulating the risky asset price movements between different regimes or market environments. This allows to stress the strong dependence of financial assets price with structural changes in the market conditions. Our main results are obtained from the key idea of working conditionally on the modulator-factor process. This reduces the problem to studying the simpler case of processes with independent increments. Our work generalizes some previous works in the literature dealing with either the exponential Lévy case or the exponential-additive case.     

Implementing and interpreting indicators of core inflation: the case of France

This paper presents a comparison of alternative indicators of underlying or “core” inflation in the French case. Four broad measures are considered and implemented. The first two are inflation excluding food and energy, and the trimmed inflation indicator. We then implement two methods relying on time-series models: the Dynamic Factor Index and the structural VAR approach.  Each indicator stresses on a particular type of shock on the inflation rate, so that no simple ranking of the measures emerges. Combining the various indicators conveys valuable information for appraising short term inflation developments. As regards theoretical interpretation, no indicator is fully satisfactory, lacking an explicit representation of monetary policy. However, comparing forecast performance with respect to inflation provides some specific support in favor of trimmed mean indicators. First version received: January 2000/Final version received: March 2001     

Performance analysis for three pillars of sustainability

Journal of Productivity Analysis - Gross domestic product (GDP) has come under criticism as the only objective that countries should pursue for societal well-being. In this paper we apply an...     

Impact of lifestyle oriented-motivation and corporate social responsibility on multiadventure sports firms´ performance

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - The number of sports firms has grown in recent years, along with the emergence in this sector of so-called lifestyle entrepreneurs. However,...     

Manipulation-proof equilibrium in atomless economies with commodity differentiation

Summary. In this paper, we introduce a perfect competition test which checks the incentives of arbitrarily small coalitions to behave strategically in endowments and preferences. We apply this coalitional incentive compatibility test to atomless economies with a continuum of differentiated commodities. We show that, under thickness conditions, economies with a finite number of types and economies whose set of agents' preferences is compact, pass this perfect competition test. Limiting results for replica economies are also presented. Received: July 25, 1997; revised version: December 5, 1998     

Towards a Universal Pension Points System in France

Intereconomics - A specificity of the current French system is that a private sector worker is currently covered by two mandatory public pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) schemes: a general defined benefit...