Ownership, Incentives and Hospitals

This article analyzes hospital privatization by comparing costs and quality between different ownership forms. We put the attention on the distinction between public hospitals and private hospitals with public funding. Using information about Spanish hospitals, we have found that private hospitals provide services at a lower cost at expenses of lower quality. We observe that property rights theory is fulfilled at least for the Spanish hospital market. The way that Heath Authorities finance publicly funded hospitals may be responsible for the differences in incentives between public and private centers. We argue that the trade-off between costs and quality could be minimized by designing financing contracts with fixed and variable components.

Patrones de publicación internacional, (ssci) de los autores afiliados a universidades españolas, en el ámbito económico-empresarial (1994-2004)

In this paper we analyse the status of scientific publications in Economics and Business in Spain (1994-2004). We focus our research in showing the preferred journals of the authors affiliated to Spanish universities, the quality of these journals and also the evolution along the decade. Throughout the paper we study deeply the areas of knowledge: which are more productive and also how the articles are distributed among Universities considering the areas of knowledge. The results show an important stability concerning the growth of published articles considering different levels of quality of journals. A second result is the important concentration in a few areas of knowledge: Fundamentals of Economic Analysis and Applied Economics. We observe a degree of specialization of several universities. Last, we display the relationship between journal publication and university’s publication pattern.