Luck of the Draw : The Causal Effect of Physicians on Birth Outcomes

This paper estimates the effect on birth outcomes of a mother’s being treated by more-skilled versus less-skilled physicians, by exploiting a Colombian government program that randomly assigned newly graduated physicians to local health centers. It estimates the impact on 255,089 children whose mothers received care in the local health centers using administrative data from the program, local health centers’ vital statistics records, and records from physicians’ mandatory graduation exams. The findings show that mothers treated at local health centers with more-skilled physicians were 9.14 percent less likely to give birth to an unhealthy baby, potentially because the more-skilled physicians better targeted care toward more-vulnerable mothers.