Madison, K. Multihospital System Membership and Patient Treatments, Expenditures, and Outcomes. Health Services Research, 2004;39(4):749-769.

1. The author is trying to assess whether system membership affects patient outcomes broadly defined. The author argues for using only acute myocardial infarction patients to look at this question. What is the justification for this? What econometric issue is she trying to deal with by focusing on these patients? What is the drawback of this approach?

2. The author uses OLS with two sets of fixed effects in the model. What are they? What study design/econometric issue are these included in an attempt to address? What would you like to know to assess whether using fixed effects is a good approach to dealing with these issues?

3. The results of the OLS fixed effects regression are in Table 4. Focus on the hospitals under 250 beds. Many of these results are statistically insignificant. How would fixed effects modeling be potentially impacting these findings? Are we concerned about statistical efficiency here? Why or why not?

4. The author argues that the main finding of the paper is that system participation lowers mortality for rural patients. She argues that there is no evidence that this is due to selection of lower mortality rural hospitals into a system based on previous performance. How does she assess this? Is there evidence of a type of selection based on performance in urban hospitals? What is it, and how might it affect how we think about the result in Table 4?

Some econometrics resources.

http://ncbae.yolasite.com/resources/IntroductoryEconometrics_AModernApproach_FourthEdition_Jeffrey_Wooldridge.pdf

https://www.princeton.edu/~otorres/Panel101.pdf

Attachment:- Article.rar