Exploring Variations in Healthcare Expenditures - What is the Role of Practice Styles?

Alexander Ahammer and Thomas Schober

No 2018-04, CDL Aging, Health, Labor working papers from The Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory Aging, Health, and the Labor Market, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: Variations in the use of medical resources, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. In this paper we explore physician practice styles as a possible determinant of these variations. In particular, we exploit patient mobility between physicians to identify practice styles among general practitioners (GPs) in Austria. We use a large administrative data set containing detailed information on a battery of different healthcare services, and implement a model with additive patient and GP fixed effects that allows flexibly for systematic differences in patients’ health states. We find that, while GPs explain a relatively small part of the overall variation in medical expenses, heterogeneities in spending patterns among GPs are substantial. Conditional on patient characteristics, we document a difference of e 751.47 per patient per year in total medical expenses (which amounts to roughly 45% of the sample mean) between high- and low-spending GPs.

Keywords: I11; I12; C23. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2018-05
Note: English
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://cdecon.jku.at/wp-content/uploads/wp1804CD.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? (2020)
Working Paper: Exploring Variations in Healthcare Expenditures – What is the Role of Practice Styles? (2017)
Working Paper: Exploring Variations in Healthcare Expenditures – What is the Role of Practice Styles? (2017)
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:jku:cdlwps:wp1804

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CDL Aging, Health, Labor working papers from The Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory Aging, Health, and the Labor Market, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by René Böheim ().