TY - JOUR
T1 - The evolution of physician practice styles
T2 - Evidence from cardiologist migration
AU - Molitor, David
N1 - Funding Information:
* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1206 S. Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820 and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) (email: [email protected]). This paper is adapted from the first chapter of my dissertation. I am very grateful to my advisors Amitabh Chandra, Amy Finkelstein, and Jonathan Gruber for their guidance and support. I thank David Chan, Joseph Doyle, Mark Duggan, Iuliana Pascu, Michael Powell, Jonathan Skinner, Heidi Williams, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. I also gratefully acknowledge feedback from seminar participants at Dartmouth College, Georgia State University, George Washington University, Harvard University, Northeastern University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, RAND, Stanford University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Warwick, and Yale University. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under award number T32-AG000186. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
PY - 2018/2/1
Y1 - 2018/2/1
N2 - Physician treatment choices for observably similar patients vary dramatically across regions. This paper exploits cardiologist migration to disentangle the role of physician-specific factors such as preferences and learned behavior versus environment-level factors such as hospital capacity and productivity spillovers on physician behavior. Physicians starting in the same region and subsequently moving to dissimilar regions practice similarly before the move. After the move, physician behavior in the first year changes by 0.6-0.8 percentage points for each percentage point change in practice environment, with no further changes over time. This suggests environment factors explain between 60-80 percent of regional disparities in physician behavior.
AB - Physician treatment choices for observably similar patients vary dramatically across regions. This paper exploits cardiologist migration to disentangle the role of physician-specific factors such as preferences and learned behavior versus environment-level factors such as hospital capacity and productivity spillovers on physician behavior. Physicians starting in the same region and subsequently moving to dissimilar regions practice similarly before the move. After the move, physician behavior in the first year changes by 0.6-0.8 percentage points for each percentage point change in practice environment, with no further changes over time. This suggests environment factors explain between 60-80 percent of regional disparities in physician behavior.
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U2 - 10.1257/pol.20160319
DO - 10.1257/pol.20160319
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85041630658
SN - 1945-7731
VL - 10
SP - 326
EP - 356
JO - American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
JF - American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
IS - 1
ER -