Journal of Labor Economics Vol. 35 No. 1 2017
Diagnosing Expertise: Human Capital, Decision Making, and Performance among Physicians
Abstract
Expert performance is often evaluated assuming that good experts have good outcomes. We examine expertise in medicine and develop a model that allows for two dimensions of physician performance: decision making and procedural skill. Better procedural skill increases the use of intensive procedures for everyone, while better decision making results in a reallocation of procedures from fewer low-risk to high-risk cases. We show that poor diagnosticians can be identified using administrative data and that improving decision making improves birth outcomes by reducing C-section rates at the bottom of the risk distribution and increasing them at the top of the distribution.
- DOI
- 10.1086/687848
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-43
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref