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Department of Economics

Events Calendar

Empirical Microeconomics Workshop, Jing Li, Weil Cornell Medical College, Cornell University

Empirical Microeconomics

Friday, September 15, 2017, 02:00pm - 03:30pm

Jing Li, Weil Cornell Medical College, Cornell University
Plastic Surgery or Primary Care?

Altruistic Preferences and Expected Specialty Choice of U.S. Medical Students

Abstract

Understanding physicians' decisions when faced with conflicts between their own financial self-interest and patients’ economic or health interests is of key importance in health economics and policy. This issue is especially salient in certain medical specialties where less altruistic behavior of physicians can yield significant financial gains. This study adopts an experimental approach to examine altruistic preferences of medical students from schools around the U.S. and whether these preferences predict their expected medical specialty choice. The experimental design consists of a set of computer-based revealed preference decision problems which ask the experimental subjects to allocate real money between themselves and an anonymous person. These data are used to derive an innovative measure of altruism for each participant which we are the first to apply in health economics. We then examine the association between altruism and expected specialty choice, after controlling for an extensive set of covariates collected from a survey questionnaire which we fielded. We find substantial heterogeneity in altruistic preferences among experimental subjects. Medical students with a lower degree of altruism are significantly more likely to choose high-income specialties. This altruism measure is more predictive of specialty than a wide range of other characteristics including parental income, student loan amount and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) score.

Location  NJ Hall 3rd Floor Library
Contact  Bingxiao Wu

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Upcoming Workshops

Fri Mar 29 @ 1:30PM - 03:00PM
Empirical Microeconomics
Jorge Arturo Valdebenito, Syracuse University

Mon Apr 01 @ 2:30PM - 04:00PM
Money, History and Finance
Maggie Jones, Emory University

Tue Apr 02 @ 3:00PM - 04:30PM
Macroeconomic Theory
Ricardo Lagos, New York University

Thu Apr 04 @ 4:00PM - 05:30PM
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Laura Liu, University of Pittsburgh

Fri Apr 05 @ 1:30PM - 03:00PM
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Tatiana Homonoff, New York University (Wagner)