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.

中文翻译：

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医生执业风格的演变：心脏病专家移民的证据


对于明显相似的患者，不同地区的医生的治疗选择差异很大。本文利用心脏病专家的迁移来理清医生特定因素（例如偏好和学习行为）与环境因素（例如医院能力和生产力溢出效应）对医生行为的影响。从同一地区开始并随后转移到不同地区的医生在转移前的做法类似。搬迁后，第一年执业环境每变化一个百分点，医生的行为就会发生0.6-0.8个百分点的变化，随着时间的推移，不会再发生进一步的变化。这表明环境因素可以解释 60-80% 的医生行为地区差异。