We analyze whether receiving care from higher-priced hospitals leads to lower mortality. We overcome selection issues by using an instrumental variable approach which exploits that ambulance companies are quasi-randomly assigned to transport patients and have strong preferences for certain...

In response to unsustainable growth in health care spending, there is enormous interest in reforming the payment system to “pay for quality instead of quantity.” While quality measures are crucial to such reforms, they face major criticisms largely over the potential failure of risk...

Endogenous patient sorting across hospitals can confound performance comparisons. This paper provides a new lens to compare hospital performance for emergency patients: plausibly exogenous variation in ambulance-company assignment. Ambulances are effectively randomly assigned to patients in the...