Hospital Ownership and Public Medical Spending
利用一项旨在改善穷人医疗服务的医院融资外生变化，检验三种所有权类型医院的行为理论，发现政府医院的软预算约束是关键差异，且私立非营利医院决策者对财务激励的反应与营利医院无异，增加的公共支出并未改善穷人健康。
The hospital market is served by firms that are private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and government-owned and operated. I use a plausibly exogenous change in hospital financing that was intended to improve medical care for the poor to test three theories of organizational behavior. I find that the critical difference between the three types of hospitals is caused by the soft budget constraint of government-owned institutions. The decision-makers in private not-for-profit hospitals are just as responsive to financial incentives and are no more altruistic than their counterparts in profit-maximizing facilities. My final set of results suggests that the significant increase in public medical spending examined in this paper has not improved health outcomes for the indigent.