Determinants of physicians' decisions to specialize

Robert Gagné and Pierre Leger

Health Economics, 2005, vol. 14, issue 7, 721-735

Abstract: In this paper, we study physician specialty decisions using several unique data sets which include information on almost all Canadian physicians who practised in Canada between 1989 and 1998. Unlike previous studies, we use a truly exogenous measure of potential income across general and specialty medicine to estimate the effect of income on physicians' specialty choices. Furthermore, our estimation procedure allows us to purge the income–effect estimates of non‐pecuniary specialty attributes which may be correlated with higher paying specialties. Understanding the effect of potential income (and other variables) on choices is necessary if the desired mix across generalists and specialists as well as across specialties is to be achieved. Our results show that physicians respond to differences in income when making their specialty decisions. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.970

Related works:
Working Paper: Determinants of Physicians' Decisions to Specialize (2003)
Working Paper: Determinants of Physicians’ Decisions to Specialize (2003)
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:wly:hlthec:v:14:y:2005:i:7:p:721-735

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().