TY  - BOOK
AU  - Barrette,Eric
AU  - Gowrisankaran,Gautam
AU  - Town,Robert
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Countervailing Market Power and Hospital Competition
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2020///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - April 2020; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - While economic theories indicate that market power by downstream firms can potentially counteract market power upstream, antitrust policy is opaque about whether to incorporate countervailing market power in merger analyses. We use detailed national claims data from the healthcare sector to evaluate whether countervailing insurer power does indeed limit hospitals' exercise of market power. We estimate willingness-to-pay models to evaluate hospital market power across analysis areas. We find that countervailing market power is important: a typical hospital merger would raise hospital prices 4.3% at the 25th percentile of insurer concentration but only 0.97% at the 75th percentile of insurer concentration
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w27005
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w27005
ER  -