This paper analyses wage discrimination against immigrants in Austria using combined information from the labour force surveys and administrative social security data. We find that immigrants experience a wage penalty of 15 percentage points compared with natives. However, a substantial part of this gap can be explained by differences in human capital endowment and job position. Decomposition methods using quantile regressions indicate larger discrimination in the upper part of the wage distribution.
Social distancing is important to slow the community spread of infectious disease, but it creates enormous economic and social cost. Thus, it is important to quantify the benefits of different measures. We study the ban of mass gatherings, an intervention with comparably low cost. We exploit exogenous spatial and temporal variation in NBA and NHL games -which arise due to the leagues' predetermined schedules -and the suspension of the 2019-20 seasons. This allows us to estimate the impact of indoor mass gatherings on COVID-19 mortality in affected US counties. One additional mass gathering increased the cumulative number of COVID-19 deaths in affected counties by 9 percent.
Variations in medical resource usage, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. In this paper, we explore physician practice styles as a possible determinant of these variations. In particular, we exploit patient mobility between physicians to identify practice styles among general practitioners (GPs) in Austria. We use a large administrative data set containing detailed information on a battery of different health-care services and implement a model with additive patient and GP fixed effects that allows flexibly for systematic differences in patients' health states. We find that, although GPs explain only a small part of the overall variation in medical expenses, heterogeneities in spending patterns among GPs are substantial. Conditional on patient characteristics, we document a difference of € 751.47 per patient per year in total medical expenses (which amounts to roughly 45% of the sample mean) between high-and low-spending GPs.
KEYWORDShealth-care expenditures, physician behavior, practice styles, statistical decomposition
JEL CLASSIFICATION
I11; I12; C23This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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