In this paper, we estimate how hospital ownership of physicians' practices affects their patients' hospital choices. We match data on the hospital admissions of Medicare beneficiaries, including the identity of their admitting physician, with data on the identity of the owner of the admitting...

`Defensive medicine' is a potentially serious social problem: if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits, then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies many times greater than the costs of compensating...

Understanding how and why liability laws and liability reforms alter the medical treatment decision-making process is central to reforming the current U.S. malpractice liability system. Survey methods serve a valuable role in this process because they measure how malpractice pressure affects...