Medical utilization, such as a count of hospitalizations, is routinely used as a health proxy for both policy and research purposes. Over time, trends in how medicine is practiced has impacted this relationship, as technological improvements or policy changes have altered hospitalizations at the...

In this paper, we use individual level data on purchases of one of the most prescribed categories of drugs (cholesterol-lowering statins) to study the responses of physicians and patients to variation in the cost of drugs. In a sample of first-time statin prescriptions to employees from a group...