Replication data for: The Determinants of Productivity in Medical Testing: Intensity and Allocation of Care

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Jason Abaluck; Leila Agha; Chris Kabrhel; Ali Raja; Arjun Venkatesh

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Replication-Files			10/12/2019 02:05:AM
LICENSE.txt	text/plain	14.6 KB	10/11/2019 10:05:PM

Project Citation:

Abaluck, Jason, Agha, Leila, Kabrhel, Chris, Raja, Ali, and Venkatesh, Arjun. Replication data for: The Determinants of Productivity in Medical Testing: Intensity and Allocation of Care. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2016. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-10-12. https://doi.org/10.3886/E112979V1

Project Description

Summary: A large body of research has investigated whether physicians overuse care. There is less evidence on whether, for a fixed level of spending, doctors allocate resources to patients with the highest expected returns. We assess both sources of inefficiency, exploiting variation in rates of negative imaging tests for pulmonary embolism. We document enormous across-doctor heterogeneity in testing conditional on patient population, which explains the negative relationship between physicians' testing rates and test yields. Furthermore, doctors do not target testing to the highest risk patients, reducing test yields by one-third. Our calibration suggests misallocation is more costly than overuse.

Scope of Project

JEL Classification:
      I11 Analysis of Health Care Markets
      I13 Health Insurance, Public and Private
      I18 Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

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V1 [2019-10-12]

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