Can Malpractice Pressure Compel a Physician to Relocate? Ellyson and Robertson (2017)
Existing literature considers the effect of changes in malpractice pressure by focusing on physician supply, and concludes that changes in tort laws have limited but some impact on physician movement. Using a panel dataset which follows a random sample of 28,227 family medicine physicians in the United States from 1992–2007, this paper evaluates whether changes in malpractice premiums impact a physician's decision to relocate their practice. Our findings suggest that even large premium growth has no impact on the physician relocation decision. Generally, these results suggest that family medicine physicians do not use relocation as a strategy to avoid malpractice pressure. However, some physicians are more inclined to relocate than others. Results indicate that group and hospital practice physicians are more likely to move to another state when premiums are high compared to solo and partnership practice physicians.
Publication available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818818301790.
List of Data Sets
-fips_state.dta Specifies state, postal code, and fipscode
-Phy_Clean.dta Family Medicine Physician data set cleaned including state vars
-Phy_Complete.dta Combined Physician data set, not cleaned
-STATE_DATA.dta Most up to date state characteristic data
-prem_final.dta Malpractice premium data from Medical Liability Monitor
Do Files
-data_describe Code for data description and state level graphics
-data_cleaning Code to clean Phy_Complete and save as Phy_Clean
-dynamicprobit Code that implements Dynamic Probit (Wooldridge)
-expand_loc Code to expand dataset, 51 obsv for each id year combo
-migration Code that generates migration patterns for four categories of malpractice pressure
-nested Code to set up nested legit
-Relo_extras Code removed from RELO_MAIN but may need later
-RELO_MAIN MAIN CODE FOR PHYSICIAN RELOCATION PAPER
-STATE_Edits Code that edits STATE_DATA.dta as needed and replaces
-Test_bordermoves Count physicians moving to border states