The Power of Daughters: How Physicians' Family Influences Female Patients' Health

Mette Gørtz, Ida L. Kristiansen and Tianyi Wang

No 33146, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: While physicians are crucial to patient outcomes, what determines physician behavior and decision making remains to be understood. In this paper, we study how physicians’ family characteristics influence physicians’ behavior and patient health outcomes. Using administrative data from Denmark and the natural experiment of a child’s gender, we find that having daughters affects male primary care physicians’ practices and the health of their female patients. Specifically, female patients cared for by male physicians with one additional daughter (compared to one additional son) are 5.5% less likely to die from female-specific cancers, including breast and gynecologic cancers. This improvement in outcomes appears to stem from enhanced cancer screening and preventive efforts, leading to earlier detection and more successful prevention. Exploring potential mechanisms, we find that male physicians with more daughters show greater attentiveness to female-specific health guidelines and are more likely to collaborate with women. We also find suggestive evidence from survey data that female patients report higher levels of trust, empathy, and clearer communication with these physicians.

JEL-codes: I10 I14 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lab
Note: CH EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33146.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33146

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33146
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().