Social interactions in inappropriate behavior for childbirth services: Theory and evidence from the Italian hospital sector

Calogero Guccio () and Domenico Lisi

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: Over the last decades the role of social interactions has become increasingly important in the economic discussion and, by now, it is acknowledged that the interaction across agents can produce both positive and negative effects. In this paper we evaluate the role of social interactions in the hospital sector using the large incidence of caesarean section, usually considered an inappropriate outcome in the childbirth service. In doing so, we lay out a theoretical model of hospitals’ behavior where the effect of peers’ behavior emerges by the simple sharing of the same institutional authority. Then, using the risk adjusted cesarean section rate of a large panel of Italian hospitals, we empirically investigate whether the behavior of each hospital is affected by the behavior of hospitals within the same region, after controlling for demand, supply and financial factors. In particular, we perform our empirical test employing both peer effects estimate and the spatial econometric approach, exploiting the panel dimension of our data. Both estimates show a significant and strong presence of peer effects among hospitals, robust to sensitivity analyses. We interpret this evidence as a large presence of constraint interactions in the healthcare sector, with important implications for the healthcare policy.

Keywords: social interactions; peer effects; caesarian section; spatial econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-hea, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/hedg/workingpapers/1428.pdf Main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social interactions in inappropriate behavior for childbirth services: theory and evidence from the Italian hospital sector (2015)
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:yor:hectdg:14/28

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York HEDG/HERC, Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Rawlings ().