A comment on "Do Doctors Improve the Health Care of Their Parents? Evidence from Admission Lotteries" by Artmann et al. (2022)

Artmann et al. (2022) investigated the influence of informal access to medical expertise by examining the effect of having a doctor as a child on the mortality and the health care use of the parents using admission lotteries to medical school as an instrumental variable. The authors found mostly small and non-significant effects for both mortality and health care utilization and concluded that informal access to medical expertise is not an important cause for any differences in mortality or health care use. We reproduce the results of this article with the replication package provided by the authors. Due to differences in the provided data, we are unable to exactly replicate the results of the authors. However, the differences between the original and our reproduced estimates are small and our conclusions do not deviate from those of the authors. Furthermore, we test the robustness of these findings by conducting a pooled parental mortality analysis and using updated data, restricting analysis to parents born before 1955, and by assessing the health care use among parents born before 1945. All original results are robust to the checks. We conclude, that although computational reproducibility was only partly possible, the interpretations of the results do not change: Among parents of medical school applicants, informal access to medical expertise is not an important cause for any differences in mortality or health care usages.