Title: Does Ownership Conversion from Nonprofit to For-Profit Benefit the Public?

Report Abstract:
In the last few decades, many healthcare institutions converted their ownership type from nonprofit to for-profit, contributing to an increased presence of for-profit ownership in the U.S. healthcare sector. There have been opposing views on whether such ownership conversions benefit the public. Employing a large panel dataset of U.S. nursing homes from 2006 to 2015, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis on converted facilities’ financial performance, operating policies, and quality of care. We observe that converted facilities significantly increased their post-conversion profit margins, compared to propensity-score-matched controls.

Speaker: Lauren Xiaoyuan Lu

Date/Time: 9:30 – 11:00AM, July 6, 2019

Location: Room 403, College of Economics and Management Building, Jiangjun Rd. Campus

Speaker Biography:
Lauren Xiaoyuan Lu is a professor of Operations and O’Herron Scholar at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests include global supply chain management, healthcare operations, and retail analytics. She has published many research articles in leading academic journals in the fields of operations management, management science, and medicine. She is an Associate Editor for both Management Science and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and a Senior Editor for Production & Operations Management. She is currently the President-Elect of the Supply Chain Management College of the POMS society and the Chair of the Supply Chain Management Special Interest Group of the MSOM society. She served as Secretary/Treasurer of the MSOM society during 2012-2014. In 2012, she won the Weatherspoon Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. She also won the first prize of the INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Competition in 2009. She received her PhD in managerial economics and strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, MS in industrial engineering from Stanford University, and BS in biochemistry from Nanjing University.