Gender-specific practice styles and ambulatory health care expenditures

Boris Kaiser

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2017, vol. 18, issue 9, No 8, 1157-1179

Abstract: Abstract This paper explores the role of physician gender in the expenditures for ambulatory care as a potential source of practice style variation. We exploit a large doctor–patient panel dataset based on insurance-claims data from Switzerland to estimate the effect of physician gender on health care expenditures. We find considerable heterogeneity across specialties. In primary care, female doctors are found to produce similar overall expenditures per visit as their male colleagues, but significantly smaller prescribing costs and significantly higher laboratory costs. In secondary-care specialties, we find that women generate lower overall expenditures, which is mainly driven by consultation costs. These findings provide evidence for the existence of sex-specific practice styles that translate into different overall expenditures as well as different compositions of these expenditures.

Keywords: Physician gender; Health care costs; Practice style; Health care expenditure; Doctor visits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10198-016-0861-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:eujhec:v:18:y:2017:i:9:d:10.1007_s10198-016-0861-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-016-0861-7

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg

More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().