EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

At the 2003 EEA Meetings in novel York, Ken Koford suggested that Susan Averett, Sara Markowitz, Jose Pagan and I spearhead an effort to create a Symposium upon Health Economics for the Eastern Economics Journal. We pick outed six of the manuscripts submitted in answer to the solicitation in the EEJ; these six were at handed at the 2004 EEA Meetings in Washington. sum of two units of the papers deal with labor minister two explore dimensions of hospital behavior, and sum of two units consider insurance-related issues. All six papers are at handed in this volume.

LABOR stock

In his article "The Labor replenish of Nurses and Nursing Assistants in the United States", John Burkett estimates labor fill up elasticities useful to policymakers designing initiatives to increase nursing business or meliorate nursing shortages. Time series for earnings and engagement 1987-2002, suggest that excess demand for registered nurtures (RNs) and for nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants (NAOAs) coexisted with exces endow of licensed practical nurses beginning around 1993 Burkett uses Bayesian limited information rules to estimate labor supply functions for RN and NAOAs, and derive short-run and lengthy run elasticities of labor endow He concludes that increased public assistance to health care providers would probably raise employ of RNs and NAOAs somewhat in the short move swiftly and more so in the lengthy run, but probably would not restore reported shortages arising from monopsony power.

Hope Corman, Kelly Noonan, and Nancy Reichman, in "Mother's Labor replenish in Fragile Families: the character of Child Health", evaluate the consequence of children's poor health upon the labor supply of their mothers. Their data, based upon a longitudinal survey of for the most part unwed mothers in 20 US cities, contains an unusually rich station of control variables, such as racial, educational and health status characteristics of the father, the nature of the relationship between the mother and father, mother's health status, and the neighborhood of other children belonging to either the mother, the father, or to the couple They examine the period following the implementation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 which increased the squeezings on mothers of young children to work compared to previous welfare a whole s They find that poor child health does bring the mother's labor supply, one as well as the other by reducing her likelihood of working (by an average of eight percentage points), and by means of reducing hours worked per week (by three hours, upon average). They also find that the mother's labor stock is higher if the father has had children with other partners.

ANALYSES OF HOSPITAL BEHAVIOR

Does the number of hospitals in a community affect hospital productivity? In "Do Agglomeration Economies Exist in the Hospital Services Industry?", Laurie Bates and Rexford Santerre present to view that hospital productivity, as measured by dint of the number of adjusted inpatient days by means of bed, rises with the number of hospitals through capita in the vicinity, and that this relationship became increasingly stronger above the 1990s. The implications of these findings for antitrust answers to local hospital mergers, Certificate of Ne programs, and health issues are considered.

Using a data source that has not to my knowledge previously been utilized by means of health economists, Maurice Moffett and Alok Bohara explore whether the mortality rates of hospital patients are sensitive to the timing of periodic hospital quality inspections by dint of the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). This is an especially interesting issue because the JCAHO not alone regulates hospital quality, but it also labor fors as an advocate of hospital interests; these characters potentially conflict. For 1995-1997, a time period when hospitals knew approximately when they would be inspected, the authors focus upon two sets of medical conditions that are belonging to all and have relatively high mortality rates. They present to view that mortality rates do in fact diminish around the time of the JCAHO inspection, and that measures of (better) patient care closely predict (lower) mortality rates. However, hospitals that secure very good scores on the other sum of two units indicators, administration and management, look after to have higher mortality rates for the sum of two units conditions studied.

HEALTH INSURANCE AND ACCESS events

In "Do Health Care Providers Quality Discriminate? Empirical Evidence from Primary Care Outpatient Clinics", Robert Rosenman, Daniel Friesner, and Christopher Steven explore whether primary care clinics in California provide fewer services to publicly insured patients (where reimbursement is based upon government-set fees) than to privately insured patients (where providers have more power to plant reimbursements). Using data for 355 community clinics, they do not find any evidence of differences in service intensity (defined as the proportion of all clashs that are repeat encounters) based upon type of insurance coverage. on the contrary they do find that lower reimbursements by dint of federal or state governments lead to a reduction in service intensity for all patients, whether publicly or privately insured.