The global ubiquity of overuse and underuse of health-care resources and the gravity of
resulting harms necessitate an investigation of drivers to inform potential solutions. We …

Unsustainable growth in healthcare expenditure demands effective cost-containment
policies. We review policy effectiveness using total payer expenditure as primary outcome …

Can we really use economic thinking to understand our health care system? Health
Economics, now in its sixth edition, not only shows how this is done, but also provides the …

This paper provides new evidence on the interaction between patient information and
physician financial incentives. Using rich microdata on childbirth, we compare the treatment …

While conducting empirical work, researchers sometimes observe changes in outcomes
before adoption of a new policy. The conventional diagnosis is that treatment is …

The role of defensive medicine in driving up health care costs is hotly contended. Physicians
and health policy experts in particular tend to have sharply divergent views on the subject …

A large body of research has investigated whether physicians overuse care. There is less
evidence on whether, for a fixed level of spending, doctors allocate resources to patients …

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the intrinsic preferences of state
appellate court judges. We construct a panel data set using published decisions from all …

Traditional strategies for medical liability reform have had limited success in controlling
malpractice costs and have not improved health care quality. Future directions will be …

Objective To estimate the cost of defensive medicine among elderly Medicare patients. Data
Sources We use a 2008 national physician survey linked to respondents' elderly Medicare …