Abstract
We examine physician responses to a global information shock and how these impact their patients. We exploit international news over the safety of an innovation in healthcare, the drugeluting stent. We use data on interventional cardiologists’ use of stents to define and measure cardiologists’ responsiveness to the initial positive news and link this to their patients’ outcomes. We find substantial heterogeneity in responsiveness to news. Patients treated by cardiologists who respond slowly to the initial positive news have fewer adverse outcomes. This is not due to patient–physician sorting. Instead, our results suggest that the differences are partially driven by slow responders being better at deciding when (not) to use the new technology, which in turn affects their patient outcomes.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 102846 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Journal of Health Economics |
| Volume | 94 |
| Early online date | 5 Jan 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank three anonymous referees, Jeffrey Clemens, Amitabh Chandra, Stefan James, Marcin Kacperczyk, Maarten Lindeboom, Alex Michaelides and seminar participants at the ESPE conference in Glasgow, EWEHE in Prague, IFS/NBER workshop in London, VfS annual meeting of Health Economists in Linz, dggö workshop for Health Econometrics in Wuppertal, AASLE conference in Canberra, IRDES-DAUPHINE workshop in Paris, IAAE conference in Montreal, and seminars in Bergen, Essen, Hamburg, Melbourne, Nuremberg, Sydney and York for valuable comments. Funding for Propper was provided from the ERC Advanced Investigator Grant Healthcare Labour. Funding by the Australian Research Council ( DP220103306 ) is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Authors
Research Groups and Themes
- ECON CEPS Health
- ECON CEPS Data
- ECON Applied Economics