IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/3567.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Quality Adjusted Cost Functions

Author

Listed:
  • Paul J. Gertler
  • Donald M. Waldman

Abstract

We propose a simple method for estimating cost functions in the presence of endogenous and unobserved quality. The theory of production, the equilibrium conditions implied by optimizing behavior, and exogenous influences on product demand are used to identify the model. An important advantage of the method is that the data requirements, above those necessary for standard cost function estimation, are minimal and the data are usually readily available. Specifically, exogenous information that influences the demand for the firm's product is required. We apply this method to estimate quality-adjusted cost functions in the nursing home industry. Estimation of a translog cost function that ignores quality yields seriously misleading estimates of marginal cost and economies of scale. In particular, while estimation of a quality-exogenous cost function reports economies of scale, estimation of a quality adjusted cost function reveals diseconomies of scale for high quality homes, constant returns to scale for average quality homes, and economies of scale for low quality homes.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul J. Gertler & Donald M. Waldman, 1990. "Quality Adjusted Cost Functions," NBER Working Papers 3567, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3567
    Note: EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3567.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Melvyn A. Fuss & Leonard Waverman, 1981. "Regulation and the Multiproduct Firm: The Case of Telecommunications in Canada," NBER Chapters, in: Studies in Public Regulation, pages 277-328, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Braeutigam, Ronald R & Daughety, Andrew F & Turnquist, Mark A, 1984. "A Firm Specific Analysis of Economies of Density in the U.S. Railroad Industry," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(1), pages 3-20, September.
    3. Braeutigam, Ronald R & Daughety, Andrew F & Turnquist, Mark A, 1982. "The Estimation of a Hybrid Cost Function for a Railroad Firm," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 64(3), pages 394-404, August.
    4. Nyman, John A., 1985. "Prospective and `cost-plus' medicaid reimbursement, excess medicaid demand, and the quality of nursing home care," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 4(3), pages 237-259, September.
    5. Lawrence J. White, 1972. "Quality Variation When Prices Are Regulated," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 3(2), pages 425-436, Autumn.
    6. Richard Schmalensee, 1977. "Comparative Static Properties of Regulated Airline Oligopolies," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 8(2), pages 565-576, Autumn.
    7. Rosen, Sherwin, 1974. "Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure Competition," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 82(1), pages 34-55, Jan.-Feb..
    8. Brown, James N & Rosen, Harvey S, 1982. "On the Estimation of Structural Hedonic Price Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(3), pages 765-768, May.
    9. Paul L. Joskow, 1980. "The Effects of Competition and Regulation on Hospital Bed Supply and the Reservation Quality of the Hospital," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 11(2), pages 421-447, Autumn.
    10. Leffler, Keith B, 1982. "Ambiguous Changes in Product Quality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 72(5), pages 956-967, December.
    11. Gertler, Paul J, 1988. "A Latent-Variable Model of Quality Determination," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 6(1), pages 97-104, January.
    12. Ronald R. Braeutigam & Mark V. Pauly, 1986. "Cost Function Estimation and Quality Bias: The Regulated Automobile Insurance Industry," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(4), pages 606-617, Winter.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Joseph P. Hughes & Loretta J. Mester, "undated". "Evidence on the Objectives of Bank Managers," Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers 4-94, Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
    2. David C. Grabowski & Jonathan Gruber & Joseph J. Angelelli, 2006. "Nursing Home Quality as a Public Good," NBER Working Papers 12361, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Dan Friesner & Robert Rosenman, 2004. "Non-profit cost-adjusting with quality as a private good," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(5), pages 511-523.
    4. Ralph Bradley, 1994. "Growth Of U.S. Health Care Spending," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 12(4), pages 45-56, October.
    5. Darius Lakdawalla & Tomas Philipson, 1998. "Nonprofit Production and Competition," NBER Working Papers 6377, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zhong, Zhen & Chen, Shufen & Kong, Xiangzhi & Tracy, Megan, 2014. "Why improving agrifood quality is difficult in China: Evidence from dairy industry," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 74-83.
    2. Paul J. Gertler, 1989. "Medicaid and the Cost of Improving Access to Nursing Home Care," NBER Working Papers 2851, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Victor Manuel Bennett & Lamar Pierce & Jason A. Snyder & Michael W. Toffel, 2013. "Customer-Driven Misconduct: How Competition Corrupts Business Practices," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(8), pages 1725-1742, August.
    4. Brasington, D. M., 2003. "The supply of public school quality," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 367-377, August.
    5. Martin Gaynor, "undated". "What Do We Know About Competition and Quality in Health Care Markets?," GSIA Working Papers 2006-E62, Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business.
    6. Steve Gibbons & Stephan Heblich & Esther Lho & Christopher Timmins, 2016. "Fear of Fracking? The Impact of the Shale Gas Exploration on House Prices in Britain," SERC Discussion Papers 0207, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    7. Amelia Bilbao & Celia Bilbao & José M. Labeaga, "undated". "The excess burden associated to characteristics of the goods: Application to housing demand," Working Papers 2005-09, FEDEA.
    8. Richard K. Green & Patric Hendershott, 1992. "Demographic Factors and Real House Prices," Wisconsin-Madison CULER working papers 92-08, University of Wisconsin Center for Urban Land Economic Research.
    9. Rickard Enström & Olof Netzell, 2008. "Can Space Syntax Help Us in Understanding the Intraurban Office Rent Pattern? Accessibility and Rents in Downtown Stockholm," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 36(3), pages 289-305, April.
    10. Bejranonda, Somskaow & Hitzhusen, Frederick J. & Hite, Diane, 1999. "Agricultural Sedimentation Impacts On Lakeside Property Values," Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association, vol. 28(2), pages 1-11, October.
    11. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/4kovgv3hs883bok2tvdkibejb6 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Taruttis, Lisa & Weber, Christoph, 2022. "Estimating the impact of energy efficiency on housing prices in Germany: Does regional disparity matter?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    13. Dimitrios A. Giannias, 1998. "A Quality of Life Based Ranking of Canadian Cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 35(12), pages 2241-2251, December.
    14. Victor Ginsburgh & Jianping Mei & Michael Moses, 2006. "On the computation of art indices in art," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/7290, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    15. Jaume García & Plácido Rodríguez & Federico Todeschini, 2020. "The Demand for the Characteristics of Football Matches: A Hedonic Price Approach," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 21(7), pages 688-704, October.
    16. Edward C. Jaenicke & Andrea C. Carlson, 2015. "Estimating and Investigating Organic Premiums for Retail‐Level Food Products," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(4), pages 453-471, October.
    17. Patrick Bajari & Jane Cooley Fruehwirth & Kyoo il Kim & Christopher Timmins, 2012. "A Rational Expectations Approach to Hedonic Price Regressions with Time-Varying Unobserved Product Attributes: The Price of Pollution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(5), pages 1898-1926, August.
    18. Paula A. Calvo & Ilse Lindenlaub & Ana Reynoso, 2021. "Marriage Market and Labor Market Sorting," NBER Working Papers 28883, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. James J. Heckman & Rosa Matzkin & Lars Nesheim, 2003. "Simulation and Estimation of Nonaddative Hedonic Models," NBER Working Papers 9895, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Wooldridge, Jeffrey M., 1996. "Estimating systems of equations with different instruments for different equations," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 387-405, October.
    21. Daniel Kessler & Mark McClellan, 1999. "Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare," NBER Chapters, in: Frontiers in Health Policy Research, volume 2, pages 53-76, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3567. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.