Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles?
利用奥地利全科医生间的患者流动数据，研究发现医生执业风格对医疗支出差异有显著影响，高低支出医生间人均年支出差达751.47欧元。
Variations in medical resource usage, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. In this paper, we explore physician practice styles as a possible determinant of these variations. In particular, we exploit patient mobility between physicians to identify practice styles among general practitioners (GPs) in Austria. We use a large administrative data set containing detailed information on a battery of different health-care services and implement a model with additive patient and GP fixed effects that allows flexibly for systematic differences in patients' health states. We find that, although GPs explain only a small part of the overall variation in medical expenses, heterogeneities in spending patterns among GPs are substantial. Conditional on patient characteristics, we document a difference of € 751.47 per patient per year in total medical expenses (which amounts to roughly 45% of the sample mean) between high- and low-spending GPs.