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Working Paper
Just What the Nurse Practitioner Ordered: Independent Prescriptive Authority and Population Mental Health
We examine whether relaxing occupational licensing to allow nurse practitioners (NPs)?registered nurses with advanced degrees?to prescribe medication without physician oversight is associated with improved population mental health. Exploiting time-series variation in independent prescriptive authority for NPs from 1990?2014, we find that broadening prescriptive authority is associated with improvements in self-reported mental health and decreases in mental-health-related mortality, including suicides. These improvements are concentrated in areas underserved by psychiatrists and among ...
Working Paper
Does Physician Pay Affect Procedure Choice and Patient Health? Evidence from Medicaid C-section Use
I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results?when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more often. I bolster the causal interpretation of this result by showing that salaried doctors do not respond to this pay differential, and by using a much larger sample of states and years. Second, unlike past work, I look at how changing physician pay affects infant health outcomes. I find that increased ...