First Do No Harm? Tort Reform and Birth Outcomes

Janet Currie and W. Bentley Macleod

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008, vol. 123, issue 2, 795-830

Abstract: In the 1980s and 1990s many states adopted tort reforms. It has been argued that these reforms have reduced the practice of defensive medicine arising from excess tort liability. We find that this does not appear to be true for a large and important class of cases—childbirth in the United States. Using data from national vital statistics natality files on millions of individual births from 1989 to 2001, we ask whether specific tort reforms affect the types of procedures that are performed, and the health outcomes of mothers and their infants. We find that reform of the Joint and Several Liability rule (or the "deep pockets rule") reduces complications of labor and procedure use, whereas caps on noneconomic damages increase them. We show that these results are consistent with a model of tort reform that explicitly allows for variations in patient condition.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (170)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/qjec.2008.123.2.795 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: First Do No Harm?: Tort Reform and Birth Outcomes (2006)
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:oup:qjecon:v:123:y:2008:i:2:p:795-830.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().