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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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,...

We use individual-level data from the 2013 New Zealand Census combined with administrative income data from the tax system to estimate the gender gap in hourly pay for the population of medical specialists employed in the New Zealand public health system. Unionisation of these doctors is 90...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As the instrument through which states regulate the professional conduct of medical practitioners, state medical boards play a critical role in addressing physician sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct in the medical profession is particularly troubling given that physicians are often privy to...

Informed consent in German medical law has a long and controversial tradition. For more than 100 years, medical treatment – even where medically indicated and performed under medical standards – constitutes an act of personal injury and therefore requires the patient’s consent. The basis...

This article studies the impact of primary care providers (PCPs) exit from the local health care system on patients’ health care utilization. I compare patients with each other whose physicians have left the local health care system at different points in time due to retirement, relocation, or...

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 patient-regarding altruism is formed by medical education, a so far under-researched question. We structurally estimate altruistic preferences using experimental data from a large sample of medical students (N=733) in Germany at different stages in their studies. The estimates...

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...

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...

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...

We draw upon newly merged administrative data sets to study the relationship between payments from medical technology firms to physicians and medical device procurement by hospitals. These payments (and the interactions that accompany them) may facilitate the transfer of valuable information to...

We study the impact of financial incentives on the prescription behavior of physicians based on a natural experiment that resulted from a recent reform in two large Swiss cities. The reform opened up an additional income channel for physician by allowing them to earn a markup on drugs they...

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in augmenting healthcare is expected to grow substantially in future decades. Current research in medical AI focuses on developing, validating, and implementing point-level AI applications in an ad-hoc manner. To harness the full power of AI to improve...

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....

This study contributes to the current understanding of what drives physicians to practice in rural areas by analyzing new, comprehensive survey data of practicing physicians in the United States. This research confirmed that rural origin is an important and reliable predictor for rural practice...

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...