Economies of scale and scope in mental health care

Economies of scale and scope in mental health care

Wilschut, J.A.
Van Hulst, B.L.
Blank, J.L.T.

Technology, Policy and Management

Values Technology and Innovation

2012-08-27

Economies of scale and scope are usually derived under the assumption that the set of production possibilities are shared by all firms in an industry irrespective of whether they specialize in a single output or not. Mental health care institutions in the Netherlands vary substantially in the scale and the number of outputs. Estimation of one cost function therefore seems very restrictive and requires the allowance of zero-values. We used a translog cost function model with dummy-variables for different types of institutions, to allow for different technologies. We found evidence for differences in technologies between institutions specialized in counseling and integrated institutions that also performed other activities, expressed by the number of days in the hospital or permanent care, number of treatments in daycare or number of day activities. The marginal costs of counseling were lower for the integrated institutions than for the specialized institutions.

economies of scale
economies of scope
stochastic frontier analysis
mental health care
IPSE Studies

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a52a7622-76ae-4fc3-81cf-b7dfcfd4e885

978 185449 437 5

DEA 2012: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Data Envelopment Analysis, Natal, Brazil, 27-30 August 2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 The Author(s)