Volume 37, Number 2 (Spring) 2002
Stinson, Martha Harrison, and Norman K. Thurston. 2002. "Racial Matching Among African-American and Hispanic Physicians and Patients." Journal of Human Resources 37(2):410-428.
It is widely known that minority doctors have more patients of their own race and ethnicity than would be predicted by random distribution, but most measures of racial matching do not control for physician specialty, practice setting, or location. When we control for these variables, differences by doctor's race are much smaller and, in many cases, not statistically significant, suggesting that simply increasing the number of minority physicians may not be the best way to increase access for under-served populations. However, we do find some evidence of culture-specific human capital (in the form of language ability) for Hispanics.
Martha Harrison Stinson is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau and Norman Thurston is an assistant professor of economics at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. The authors recognize the generosity of the Robert Wood Johnson foundation (RWJF) in making the data available and the BYU College of Family Home and Social Sciences for funding. They thank John Abowd, George Jakubson, and Karl Snow for useful comments on earlier drafts. The primary data used in this paper are available through ICPSR, but the zip code information is restricted and requires special permission. The authors can provide information on obtaining these permissions and can assist in providing the data beginning December 2001 through December 2004. Contact Norman Thurston at 130 Faculty Office Building, Provo, Utah 84602-2363 or bye-mail at nkt@byu.edu for more information. Any findings expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Census Bureau or Brigham Young University.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X