The healthcare sector in general and hospitals in particular represent a main application area for Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This paper reviews 262 papers of DEA applications in healthcare with special focus on hospitals and therefore closes a gap of over ten years that were not covered by existing review articles. Apart from providing descriptive statistics of the papers, we are the first to examine the research purposes of the publications. These research goals can be grouped into four distinct clusters according to our proposed framework. The four clusters are (1) "Pure DEA efficiency analysis", i.e. performing a DEA on hospital data, (2) "Developments or applications of new methodologies", i.e. applying new DEAy approaches on hospital data, (3) "Specific management question", i.e. analyzing the effects of managerial specification, such as ownership, on hospital efficiency, and (4) "Surveys on the effects of reforms", i.e. researching the impact of policy making, such as reforms of health systems, on hospital efficiency. Furthermore, we analyze the methodological settings of the studies and describe the applied models. We analyze the chosen inputs and outputs as well as all relevant downstream techniques. A further contribution of this paper is its function as a roadmap to important methodological literature and publications, which provide crucial information on the setup of DEA studies. Thus, this paper should be of assistance to researchers planning to apply DEA in a hospital setting by providing information on a) what has been published between 2005 and 2016, b) possible pitfalls when setting up a DEA analysis, and c) possible ways to apply the DEA analysis in practice. Finally, we discuss what could be done to advance DEA from a scientific tool to an instrument that is actually utilized by managers and policymakers.

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America’s ‘infatuation with homeownership’ has been identified as one cause of the latest financial crisis. Based on codings of 1809 party manifestos in 19 countries since 1945, this article addresses the question of where the political ideal to democratize homeownership came from. While conservative parties have defended homeownership across countries and time, centre-left parties have oscillated between a pro-homeownership and a pro-rental position. The former occurs in Anglo-Saxon, Northern and Southern European countries, while the latter prevails among German-speaking countries. Beyond partisan effects, once a country has a majority of homeowners and parties defending homeownership, larger parties are more likely to support it. The extent of centre-left parties’ support for homeownership is further associated with higher homeownership rates, more encouraging mortgage regimes and a bigger housing bubble burst after 2007. The ideational origins of the financialization of housing and private Keynesianism are, after all, not only conservative and market-liberal.

The aim of this study was to determine whether cysteine-rich secretory protein 3 (CRISP3) expression is linked to clinically or molecularly relevant subgroups of prostate cancer. A tissue microarray representing samples from 410 000 prostate cancers from radical prostatectomy specimens with clinical follow-up data were analyzed for CRISP3 expression by immunohistochemistry. CRISP3 expression was also compared with key genomic alterations of prostate cancer. CRISP3 staining was found as weak in 15%, moderate in 8.5%, and strong in 7.2% of prostate cancers, whereas no expression was detected in normal prostate. Strong CRISP3 expression was linked to advanced tumor stage, high Gleason score, and positive surgical margin status (Po0.0001 each). There was a marked accumulation of high CRISP3 expression in PTEN-deleted ERG-positive tumors (Po0.0001). A total of, 21.7% of ERG-positive and PTEN-deleted cancers had strong CRISP3 expression, but only 10.4% of ERG-positive cancers without PTEN deletion (Po0.0001). The rate of high CRISP3 expression was 2.5% in ERG-negative cancers (P ¼ 0.0001; vs ERG-positive cancers). Accordingly, CRISP3 overexpression was associated with early prostate-specific antigen recurrence in all tumors (P ¼ 0.0013) as well as in ERGnegative (P ¼ 0.004) and ERG-positive cancers (P ¼ 0.0318). CRISP3 expression did not retain prognostic significance in models also involving PTEN deletions. Strong CRISP3 expression is associated with unfavorable tumor phenotype and early recurrence in prostate cancers. The tight link of strong CRISP3 expression to the ERG fusion-positive prostate cancers with PTEN deletions provides further evidence for the existence of molecularly distinct subgroups of prostate cancers.

This paper advances the first historically informed typology of housing finance systems. Using a novel collection of historical mortgage-market data, we identify four different ‘ideal type’ systems, which developed in mature economies when organised housing finance institutions began to emerge with the advance of industrialism and urbanism throughout the long nineteenth century: informal person-to-person lending, and state lending as solutions outside specialised banking circuits; and deposit-based and bond-based institutions as banking solutions. We adapt Alexander Gerschenkron's economic backwardness thesis in order to explain the temporal and spatial emergence of these distinct types, arguing that these systems created path-dependent logics, which made their influence felt over a century later

Recent research has emphasized the negative effects of finance on macroeconomic performance and even cautioned of a “finance curse.” As one of the main drivers of financial sector growth, mortgages have traditionally been hailed as increasing the number of homeowners in a country. This article uses long-run panel data for seventeen countries between 1920 (1950) and 2013 to show that the effect of the “great mortgaging” on homeownership rates is not universally positive. Increasing mortgage debt appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for higher homeownership levels. There were periods of rising homeownership levels without much increase in mortgages before 1980, thanks to government programs, purchasing power increases, and less inflated house prices. There have also been mortgage increases without homeownership growth, but with house price bubbles thereafter. The liberalization of financial markets might after all be a poor substitute for more traditional housing policies

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Comparative welfare and production regime literature has so far neglected the considerable cross-country differences in the sphere of housing. The United States became a country of homeowners living in cities of single-family houses in the twentieth century. Its housing policy was focused on supporting private mortgage indebtedness with only residual public housing. Germany, on the contrary, remained a tenant-dominated country with cities of multi-unit buildings. Its housing policy has been focused on construction subsidies to non-profit housing associations and incentives for savings earmarked for financing housing. The article claims that these differences are the outcome of different housing institutions that had already emerged in the nineteenth century. Germany developed non-profit housing associations and financed housing through mortgage banks, both privileging the construction of rental apartments. In the United States, savings and loan associations favored mortgages for owner-occupied, single-family house construction. When governments intervened during housing crises in the 1920/1930s, they aimed their subsidies at these existing institutions. Thus, US housing policy became finance-biased in favor of savings and loan associations, while Germany supported the housing cooperatives.La littérature comparée consacrée aux régimes de production et de protection sociale a jusqu’à présent négligé les différences considérables entre pays dans le domaine du logement. Les États-Unis sont devenus, au cours du XXe siècle, un pays de propriétaires vivants majoritairement dans des villes et dans des maisons individuelles. La politique américaine a soutenu l’endettement privé pour le logement avec une part de logement public résiduel. L’Allemagne, au contraire, est restée un pays de locataires avec des villes composées de bâtiments collectifs. La politique allemande a soutenu des associations à but non lucratif et une forte incitation à l’épargne logement. L’article envisage ces différences comme le résultat d’une histoire institutionnelle qui débute au XIXe siècle. L’Allemagne a développé des associations de logement à but non lucratif et a financé le logement par l’intermédiaire de banques hypothécaires, tous deux privilégiant la construction d’appartements locatifs. Aux États-Unis, les associations d’épargne et de crédit ont favorisé le recours à des prêts hypothécaires pour les propriétaires-occupants, et ce faisant la construction de maison individuelles. Lorsque les gouvernements interviennent au cours de la crise du logement dans les années 1920-1930, leurs soutiens au logement passent par ces institutions préexistantes. Ainsi, la politique américaine de logement tend-elle à privilégier les associations d’épargne et de crédit, là où l’Allemagne soutient les coopératives d’habitation.Zusammenfassung Die vergleichende Wohlfahrts- und Kapitalismusforschung hat bisher weitgehend die bedeutenden Länderunterschiede im Wohnungssektor vernachlässigt. So wurden auf der einen Seite die USA im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts ein...