Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty, henceforth (PTCA) for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI)-a high-tech treatment-is more frequently used in Japan than in other developed countries. This paper adopts the two-phase model to examine whether the high PTCA use is driven by the self-interest of physicians, or by behavioral character. After controlling for a patient's detailed characteristics, we found that increases in the relative numbers of hospitals and physicians are significantly related to physician-initiated expenditures and the effect is higher for high-tech treatments. The results based on municipal-level aggregated data also support this conclusion.
JEL classification: I11
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| Abstract---------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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| 1. Introduction---------------------------------------------------------------- |
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| 2. Previous Studies on PID--------------------------------------------------- |
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| 3. Data----------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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| 4. Empirical Specification and Measurements--------------------------------- |
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| 5. Empirical Results----------------------------------------------------------- |
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| 6. Conclusions---------------------------------------------------------------- |
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| References------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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| Notes------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
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| Tables |
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