NURSING-HOME CARE IN THE NETHERLANDS - A NONPARAMETRIC EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS

This paper analyzes the technical efficiency of Dutch nursing homes wi th respect to the use of labor inputs by means of Data Envelopment Ana lysis (DEA). In addition, the determinants of the efficiency scores ar e investigated using censored regression analysis. Special attention i s paid to checking the robustness of the results to using different ve rsions of DEA and to the econometric specification of the censored reg ression models. Fifty percent of the nursing homes are fully efficient , according to the theoretically preferred frontier with constant or d ecreasing returns to scale. There is some evidence of a trade-off betw een labor input efficiency and the quality of care.