Our understanding of the determinants of physician skill and the extent to which skill is valued in the marketplace is superficial. Using a large, detailed panel of new obstetricians, we find that, even though physicians' maternal complication rates improve steadily with years of practice,...

Small-area-variation studies have shown that physician treatment styles differ substantially both between and within markets, controlling for patient characteristics. Using data on the universe of deliveries in Florida and New York over a 15-year period, we examine why treatment styles differ...

Epidemiologists and social scientists agree that place shapes health. But the model of "risk factor" epidemiology faces limits in explaining how neighborhoods, as complex systems, produce health or disease. This paper describes how visual methods can advance epidemiological inquiry. Drawing from...

This study explores critical care nurses' beliefs, motivations, and experiences regarding end of life care. We performed a content analysis of the text comments provided by 468 U.S. critical care nurses in response to an anonymous mail survey about euthanasia. These comments reveal that these...

Physicians are increasingly faced with choices in which one screening strategy is both more effective and more expensive than another. One way to make such choices is to examine the cost-effectiveness of the more costly strategy over the less costly one. However, little is known about how...

This study examines the effect of price regulation and competition on launch timing and pricing of new drugs. Our data cover launch experience in 15 countries for drugs in 12 therapeutic classes that experienced significant innovation over the decade 1992-2003. We use prices of established...