When physicians own complementary medical service facilities such as clinical laboratories and imaging centers, they gain financially by referring patients to these service entities. This situation creates an incentive for the physician to exploit the consumers' trust by recommending more...

Spending on prescription drugs (Rx) represents one of the fastest growing components of U.S. healthcare spending, and has coincided with an expansion of pharmaceutical promotional spending. Most (83%) of Rx promotion is directed at physicians in the form of visits by pharmaceutical...

There is considerable controversy about the causes of regional variations in health care expenditures. Using vignettes from patient and physician surveys linked to fee-for-service Medicare expenditures, this study asks whether patient demand-side factors or physician supply-side factors explain...

Advocates for “personalized medicine” tests claim they can reduce health care spending by identifying patients unlikely to benefit from costly treatments. But most tests are imperfect, and so physicians have considerable discretion in how they use the results. We show that when physicians...

We develop a model of the efficiency of medical testing based on rates of negative CT scans for pulmonary embolism. The model is estimated using a 20% sample of Medicare claims from 2000- 2009. We document enormous across-doctor heterogeneity in testing decisions conditional on patient risk and...

Introduction: Until recently, adjuvant treatment options for higher stage resectable cutaneous melanoma were limited. Two studies with a similar set-up, published 2017, led to registration of targeted therapy for BRAF-mutated melanoma with dabrafenib and trametinib as well as of the...

We empirically assess the potential financial impact of future gene therapies on the US economy. After identifying 109 late-stage gene therapy clinical trials currently underway, we estimate the number of new and existing patients with corresponding diseases to be treated by these gene...

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...