The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 106 No. 4 2024

Hospital Allocation and Racial Disparities in Health Care

Amitabh Chandra¹; Pragya Kakani²; Adam Sacarny³

¹ Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and NBER · ² Harvard University and NBER · ³ Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and NBER

Abstract

We develop a framework to measure the role of hospital allocation in racial disparities in health care and use it to study Black and white heart attack patients. Black patients receive care at lower-performing hospitals than white patients. However, over two decades, the performance gap between hospitals treating Black and white patients shrank by over two-thirds. This progress is due to more rapid performance improvement at hospitals that tended to treat Black patients rather than reallocation of patients. Hospital improvement is correlated with adoption of a productivity-raising input, beta blockers. Our work highlights reallocation and performance improvement as future disparity-reduction levers.

DOI

10.1162/rest_a_01248

Volume

106

Issue

4

Pages

924-937

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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