Expert decision-makers often deviate from evidence-based guidelines. If experts lack awareness of guidelines, dissemination may improve outcomes. If experts who are aware of guidelines continue to deviate, promoting stricter adherence has ambiguous effects on outcomes, depending on whether...

We develop a model of the efficiency of medical testing based on rates of negative CT scans for pulmonary embolism. The model is estimated using a 20% sample of Medicare claims from 2000- 2009. We document enormous across-doctor heterogeneity in testing decisions conditional on patient risk and...

Local opinion leaders may play a key role in easing information frictions associated with technology adoption. This paper analyzes the influence of physician investigators who lead clinical trials for new cancer drugs. By comparing diffusion patterns across 21 new cancer drugs, we separate...

Pharmaceutical companies' marketing efforts primarily target physicians, often through individual detailing that entails monetary or in-kind transfers. We study how peer influence broadens these payments' reach beyond the directly paid physicians. Combining Medicare prescriptions and Open...

How does team structure affect productivity? We address this question with an application to healthcare by examining the teams that primary care physicians (PCPs) assemble when they refer patients to specialists. Our theoretical model analyzes how PCPs trade off costly coordination against...

Fragmented health care occurs when care is spread out across a large number of poorly coordinated providers. We analyze care fragmentation, an important source of inefficiency in the US healthcare system, by combining an economic model of regional practice styles with an empirical study of...

This paper studies how insurance coverage policies affect incentives for pharmaceutical innovation. In the United States, the majority of drugs are sold to Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), which administer prescription drug plans on behalf of insurers. Beginning in 2012, PBMs began adopting...

Patients often receive healthcare from providers spread across different firms. Transaction costs, imperfect information, and other frictions can make it difficult to coordinate production across firm boundaries, but we do not know how these challenges affect healthcare. We define and measure...

We explore the in- and out- of sample robustness of tests for consumer choice inconsistencies based on parameter restrictions in parametric models, with a focus on tests proposed by Ketcham, Kuminoff and Powers (2015). We start by arguing that non-parametric alternatives are inherently...

Medicare Part D enrollees face a complicated decision problem: they must dynamically choose prescription drug consumption in each period given difficult- to-find prices and a non-linear budget set. We use Medicare Part D claims data from 2006-2009 to estimate a flexible model of consumption that...