Urgent care centers (UCCs) are a cost-efficient substitute to the emergency department (ED) for non-emergent conditions, but no study has identified their impact on ED demand. We address this gap using a novel strategy that exploits daily UCC operating times in a differencing framework. After...

Since 1992, the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) has published cardiac care report cards for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery providers. We examine the impact of CABG report cards on a provider's aggregate volume and volume by patient severity and then employ a...

Over the last several decades, numerous medical studies have compared the effectiveness of two common procedures for Coronary Artery Disease: Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) and Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG). Most evidence indicates that CABG - the more invasive procedure - leads...

21 states and the District of Columbia currently have laws that permit marijuana use for medical purposes, often termed medical marijuana laws (MMLs). We tested the effects of MMLs adopted in seven states between 2004 and 2011 on adolescent and adult marijuana, alcohol, and hard drug use. We...

To test how practice interruptions affect worker productivity, we estimate how temporal breaks affect surgeons' performance of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Using a sample of 188 surgeons who performed 56,315 CABG procedures in Pennsylvania between 2006 and 2010, we find that a...

Physicians, acting in their role as experts, are often faced with situations where they must trade off personal and patient welfare. Physicians' incentives vary based on the organizational environment in which they practice. We use the publication of a major clinical trial, which found that a...

Advocates for “personalized medicine” tests claim they can reduce health care spending by identifying patients unlikely to benefit from costly treatments. But most tests are imperfect, and so physicians have considerable discretion in how they use the results. We show that when physicians...

We examine the effect of increasing the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment rate on reducing violent and property crime rates, based on county-level panels of SUD treatment and crime data between 2001 and 2008 across the United States. To address the potential endogeneity of the SUD treatment...

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The...