Do Hospital Mergers Reduce Waiting Times? Theory and Evidence from the English NHS

Vanessa Cirulli, Giorgia Marini, Marco Marini and Odd Rune Straume

No 337014, FEEM Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)

Abstract: We analyse – theoretically and empirically – the effect of hospital mergers on waiting times in healthcare markets where prices are fixed. Using a spatial modelling framework where patients choose provider based on travelling distance and waiting times, we show that the effect is theoretically ambiguous. In the presence of cost synergies, the scope for lower waiting times as a result of the merger is larger if the hospitals are more profit-oriented. This result is arguably confirmed by our empirical analysis, which is based on a conditional flexible difference-indifferences methodology applied to a long panel of data on hospital mergers in the English NHS, where we find that the effects of a merger on waiting times crucially rely on a legal status that can reasonably be linked to the degree of profit-orientation. Whereas hospital mergers involving Foundation Trusts tend to reduce waiting times, the corresponding effect of mergers involving hospitals without this legal status tends to go in the opposite direction

Keywords: Health Economics and Policy; Productivity Analysis; Public Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52
Date: 2023-07-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eff, nep-hea, nep-ind and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/337014/files/NDL2023-014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Hospital Mergers Reduce Waiting Times? Theory and Evidence from the English NHS (2023)
Working Paper: Do hospital mergers reduce waiting times? Theory and evidence from the english NHS (2023)
Working Paper: Do Hospital Mergers Reduce Waiting Times? Theory and Evidence from the English NHS (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:feemwp:337014

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.337014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FEEM Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().