Improving Productivity: Theory and Application to Australian Hospitals (2017-2025)

This project will significantly improve existing methods for analysing productivity and efficiency of economic organisations, by generating new central limit theorems and new nonparametric frontier estimators for panel data. The new methods will be applied to Australian hospitals, to analyse their productivity and efficiency, identify the best-practices and their determinants and recommend improvements and necessary reforms. The high level of healthcare costs in Australia, about 5% of GDP, as well as their rapid and accelerating growth, imply that application of our novel methods can save billions of dollars and, more importantly, thousands of lives.