The Evolution of Physician Practice Styles: Evidence from Cardiologist Migration
利用心脏病专家跨地区流动的数据，研究发现医生行为差异的60%-80%可由执业环境因素解释，而医生个人因素影响较小。
Physician treatment choices for observably similar patients vary dramatically across regions. This paper exploits cardiologist migration to disentangle the role of physician-specific factors such as preferences and learned behavior versus environment-level factors such as hospital capacity and productivity spillovers on physician behavior. Physicians starting in the same region and subsequently moving to dissimilar regions practice similarly before the move. After the move, physician behavior in the first year changes by 0.6-0.8 percentage points for each percentage point change in practice environment, with no further changes over time. This suggests environment factors explain between 60-80 percent of regional disparities in physician behavior.