Diagnosing Expertise: Human Capital, Decision Making, and Performance among Physicians

Janet Currie and W. Bentley Macleod

Journal of Labor Economics, 2017, vol. 35, issue 1, 1 - 43

Abstract: Expert performance is often evaluated assuming that good experts have good outcomes. We examine expertise in medicine and develop a model that allows for two dimensions of physician performance: decision making and procedural skill. Better procedural skill increases the use of intensive procedures for everyone, while better decision making results in a reallocation of procedures from fewer low-risk to high-risk cases. We show that poor diagnosticians can be identified using administrative data and that improving decision making improves birth outcomes by reducing C-section rates at the bottom of the risk distribution and increasing them at the top of the distribution.

Date: 2017
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Working Paper: Diagnosing Expertise: Human Capital, Decision Making and Performance Among Physicians (2013)
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