Roughly a quarter of physicians in the United States are either international medical graduates (IMGs) or foreign-born physicians (FBPs). We propose a theoretical model where patient preferences that disfavor IMGs and FBPs may result in those physicians offering better access to their services...

The UK imports many doctors from abroad, where medical training and experience might be different. This study attempts to understand how drug prescription behaviour differs in English GP practices which have larger or smaller numbers of foreign-trained GPs. Results show that in general practices...

Unlike most European countries, a majority of the population in Ireland pay out of pocket for a range of primary-care services, including general practitioner (GP) care. In 2017, the Committee on the Future of Healthcare published its final report (the Sláintecare Report; Houses of the...

This study examines how changes to patients' financial responsibility affect physicians' behavior. This is achieved by examining a health insurance reform that changes patients' relative financial responsibilities for a medical service that can be received at one of two locations. In particular,...

This paper investigates the returns to health care provision during the mortality transition. We construct a new panel data set covering German municipalities from 1928 to 1936. The endogeneity of health care supply is addressed by using the expulsion of Jewish physicians from statutory health...

We study how competition between physicians affects the provision of medical care. In our theoretical model physicians are faced with a heterogeneous patient population, in which patients systematically vary with regard to both, their responsiveness to the provided quality of care and their...

Using a unique survey of almost 2,000 Czech and Slovak medical students run in 2020 and 2021, the paper investigates whether gender inequality and stereotypes as proxied by the gender unemployment rate gap drive students' choices of specialities. The data suggest that the higher the gender...

We estimate doctor value-added and provide evidence on the distribution of physician quality in an entire country, combining rich population-wide register data with random assignment of patients to general practitioners (GPs). We show that there is substantial variation in the quality of...

We study the factors that predict medical malpractice ("med mal") insurance premia, using national data from Medical Liability Monitor over 1990 to 2017. A number of core findings are not easily explained by standard economic theory. First, we estimate long run elasticities of premia to...

Mitigating the adverse effects of uncertainty in appointment systems, arising from heterogeneous patient needs and preferences, is critical to the effective use of scarce medical resources and patient satisfaction. This study addresses an online scheduling problem with multiple servers and...

While the presence of disparities in healthcare is well documented, the mechanisms of such disparities are less understood, particularly in relation to mental health. This paper develops and estimates a structural model of diagnosis for the most prevalent child mental health condition, Attention...

There is a robust literature documenting the importance of physician practice style (e.g., the propensity to perform certain operations) in explaining outcomes related to patients' physical health. Yet little is known about the role of physicians in explaining patients' mental health outcomes....

The shortage of primary care physicians is a global healthcare problem, especially in rural areas. In this paper, we analyse the choice of location of primary care physicians and estimate the causal effect of financial incentives on the supply of primary care physicians in underserved areas. Our...

What is the role of general practitioners (GPs) in supporting or hindering public health efforts? We investigate the influence of vaccine-skeptic GPs on their patients' decisions to get a COVID-19 vaccination. We identify vaccine-skeptic GPs from the signatories of an open letter in which 199...

What is the role of general practitioners (GPs) in supporting or hindering public health efforts? We investigate the influence of vaccine-skeptic GPs on their patients' decisions to get a COVID-19 vaccination. We identify vaccine-skeptic GPs from the signatories of an open letter in which 199...

There is widespread and unexplained variation in the outcomes of similar patients across place and providers in all developed health systems. This paper provides new evidence on the role senior doctors play in determining patient outcomes. I exploit within-hospital quasi-random assignment of...

Variation in technology adoption is a key driver of differences in productivity. Previous studies sought to explain variations in technology adoption by heterogeneity in profitability, costs of adoption, or other factors. Less is known about how adoption is affected by bias in the perceived...

We analyze prescription behavior of physicians in the public and private sector. We study two major diseases for which an effective, widely accepted low-cost treatment and alternative, more expensive treatments are available. We find that private sector physicians are more likely to prescribe...

This paper investigates the potential of new technologies to reduce disparities in the provision of healthcare services. Differences in providers’ skills may cause variation in patient outcomes. The adoption of innovations, like robots, can attenuate this problem if technological gains are...

We investigate whether primary care physician and patient concordance in terms of socio-economic status (SES) reduces the SES inequality in health. We measure physicians' SES by their childhood SES and find that SES concordance decreases low-SES patients' mortality, while high-SES patients'...

We study whether and how early labor market choices determine longer-run career versus family outcomes differentially for male and female professionals. We analyze the physician labor market by exploiting a randomized lottery that determines the sorting of Danish physicians into internships...

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on independent physicians. Initially, in response to the pandemic, non-emergency medical appointments, including routine visits, non-emergency sick visits, and elective procedures were cancelled or replaced with virtual visits, when possible. Even as states...

This paper estimates the impact of gifts - monetary or in-kind payments - from pharmaceutical firms on physicians’ prescription decisions and drug costs in the US. Using exhaustive micro data on prescriptions for anti-diabetic drugs from Medicare Part D, we find that payments cause physicians...

In this study we examine the effects of transferring physicians from a compensation system based on salary to a profit-sharing system. Consistent with theory, we find that the change has a large and significant effect on the quantity of services provided. In addition, we find a selection effect,...

Understanding how and why liability laws and liability reforms alter the medical treatment decision-making process is central to reforming the current U.S. malpractice liability system. Survey methods serve a valuable role in this process because they measure how malpractice pressure affects...

In January 2018, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology issued a position statement opposing the punishment of women for self-induced abortion. To those unfamiliar with emerging trends in abortion in the United States and worldwide, the need for the declaration might not be apparent....

The fast spread of the COVID-19 pandemic brought huge workload burden, where health care workers are a particular risk group for developing mental health symptoms, women being the most affected group according to preliminary data. The aim of this study was to provide information about the...

Health economists typically use agency theory to predict how physicians respond to various policy schemes. Empirical studies show that many schemes lead to unintended responses, indicating that current theoretical models fail to fully explain physicians’ behaviour. Drawing on key lessons from...

A host of different factors affect health and longevity, ranging from genetic endowments to public policy. Physicians have a substantial influence on patients’ health and health-related costs, but we know little about the extent of this influence beyond clinical decisions such as adequate...

To address regional inequities in access to healthcare, the U.S. government designates primary care Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs). Several programs use these designations to incentivize physicians to practice in areas of need, including a large program through which the Centers for...

The determinants of the presence of “Foreign Doctorate Students” among 36 European Countries for the period 2010-2019 are analyzed in this article. Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Random Effects, WLS, Pooled OLS, and Dynamic Panel are used to investigate the data. We found that the presence...

In this study we attempt to understand the relatively expensive and medicalized maternity care service industry in the United States by exploring the regulatory environment around alternatives to hospital births. We argue that a variety of existing regulations—restrictive licensing...