International Comparison of Physician Incomes

Aidan Buehler, Joshua Gottlieb, Jeffrey Hicks, Lisa Laun, Mårten Palme, Maria Polyakova, Victoria Udalova and Maria Ventura

No 34956, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We compare physician incomes using tax data from the United States, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Physicians are concentrated in the top percentiles of the income distribution in all four countries, especially in the United States and certain specialties. Physician incomes are highest in the United States, and a decomposition shows that this mainly reflects differences in overall income distributions, rather than physicians’ locations in those distributions. This suggests that broader labor market differences, and thus physicians’ outside options, drive absolute incomes. Shifting US physicians’ incomes to match relative positions in other countries’ distributions would only marginally reduce healthcare spending.

JEL-codes: I13 I18 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
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