Improving patient compliance with physicians’ treatment or prescription recommendations is an important goal in medical practice. This paper examines the causal relationship between treatment progress and patient compliance. We hypothesize that patients balance expected benefits and costs...

Improving patient compliance with physicians' treatment or prescription recommendations is an important goal in medical practice. We examine the relationship between treatment progress and patient compliance. We hypothesize that patients balance expected benefits and costs during a treatment...

This paper studies the effectiveness of treatment for substance abuse with data on more than 10,000 treatment episodes from Maine. We measure effectiveness as the reduction in the rate of drug use between admission and discharge. In a nonexperimental setting we use instrumental variables to...