Forgetting-by-not-doing: The case of surgeons and cesarean sections

Gabriel Facchini

Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona

Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on the link between patient outcome and physician experience. Using birth certificates data from a large hospital in Italy, I analyze whether cesarean section surgeons who have performed more procedures in the recent past observe an improvement in performance. By using data from the Italian health care system, where patients are not allowed to choose their physician, I lower concerns of potential reverse causality (selective referral). I find evidence indicating a strong learning-by-doing effect: for emergent cases, a one standard deviation increase in recent experience reduces the likelihood of neonatal intensive care unit admission by nearly 2.9 percentage points (12%) and of being born with a low Apgar Score by about 1.3 percentage points (9.5%), all else equal. This effect is not present for the case of elective C-sections.

Keywords: Learning-by-doing; human capital; experience; volume; cesarean section; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I18 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://ddd.uab.cat/repec/doc/wpdea2010.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Forgetting‐by‐not‐doing: The case of surgeons and cesarean sections (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uab:wprdea:wpdea2010

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