Using an extensive survey of Canadian physicians, this paper studies how physician practice patterns are shaped by demographic characteristics, physician specialty, and government policy. We model the simultaneous determination of group size, primary source of professional income (fee-for- service or salaried position), weekly hours of direct patient care, and total weekly hours of work. Coefficient estimates are precisely identified and are consistent with a life cycle model of self-employed professionals. Hours of work peak after about twenty years of practice and the probability of having a solo practice rises steadily with experience. With all else constant in the model, physicians who work under fee-for-service see patients 11 more hours each week than physicians who are primarily salaried, and yet fee-for-service physicians work only one or two hours more per week in total. Physicians in Quebec, the province with the strictest limits to physician billing in 1990, work significantly fewer hours than physicians in any of the other provinces and are more likely to work for a salary in large groups.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Queen's University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
924.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)