Environmental factors and productivity on Dutch hospitals: a semi-parametric approach

This paper describes the efficiency of Dutch hospitals using the method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In particular the analysis focuses on explaining cost inefficiency measures due to each hospital’s operating environment. In previous works, the resulting DEA score is regressed on environmental factors via a Tobit approach. Previously, these approaches have been used (Simar and Wilson, J Prod Anal 7(1):63–80, 2000) but later these authors (Simar and Wilson 2007) demonstrated that bias is incurred since the efficiency score is a point estimate without a probability distribution around it that is required by the Tobit methodology. In this paper we use the Simar and Wilson bootstrapping techniques in order to obtain more efficient estimates of the environmental effects. It is shown that differences in estimated effects exist between the non-bootstrapped and bootstrapped models.