Barton Hamilton

Barton Hamilton
Washington University in St. Louis | WUSTL , Wash U · Olin Business School

About

82
Publications
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7,871
Citations

Publications

Publications (82)
Article
We combine state minimum wage changes with individual‐level income and credit data to estimate the effect of wage gains on the debt of low‐wage workers. In the three years following an $0.88 minimum wage increase, low‐wage workers experience a $2,712 income increase and a $856 decrease in debt. The entire decline in debt comes from less student loa...
Article
We develop and estimate a dynamic structural model of demand in a setting where product characteristics endogenously evolve in response to aggregate consumer choices. The direction and speed of innovation is inefficient because individuals do not account for their influence on innovation, creating an externality. Our application focuses on drugs in...
Article
Using detailed data for U.S. homeowners, we document a negative, nonlinear relation between the loan-to-value ratio (LTV) of homeowners’ primary residence and their labor income. Consistent with high LTV individuals experiencing constrained mobility, we find stronger effects among subprime, liquidity- constrained individuals and those living in reg...
Article
We treat health as a form of human capital and hypothesize that women with more human capital face stronger incentives to make costly investments with future payoffs, such as avoiding abusive partners and reducing drug use. To test this hypothesis, we exploit the unanticipated introduction of an HIV treatment, HAART, which dramatically improved HIV...
Article
Full-text available
We construct a structural model of entry into self‐employment to evaluate the impact of policies supporting entrepreneurship. Previous work has recognized that workers may opt for self‐employment due to the nonpecuniary benefits of running a business and not necessarily because they are good at it. Other literature has examined how socio‐emotional...
Article
Objective: To determine the impact of surgical site infections (SSIs) on health care costs following common ambulatory surgical procedures throughout the cost distribution. Background: Data on costs of SSIs following ambulatory surgery are sparse, particularly variation beyond just mean costs. Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study...
Article
We use unique data on careers of investment managers to study the relation between labor markets and productivity differences across sectors in finance. We document significant labor mobility between mutual funds and hedge funds during the 1990s and 2000s. Descriptive evidence suggests potential inefficiencies in the allocation of skill and capital...
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Full-text available
We propose a dynamic framework to study the value of medical innovation in the context of infectious disease. We apply our framework to evaluate an HIV treatment breakthrough known as HAART. The model captures how, in lowering both the expected cost and likelihood of HIV infection, HAART reduced the implicit price of risky sex. Forward-looking agen...
Article
Background: There is increasing interest in profiling the quality of individual medical providers. Valid assessment of individuals should highlight improvement opportunities, but must be considered in the context of limitations. Study design: High quality clinical data from the American College of Surgeons NSQIP, gathered in accordance with stri...
Article
A puzzling feature of entrepreneurship is that many individuals are self-employed even though they would earn more in paid employment. To shed light on this puzzle, we examine the role of personality traits in determining entrepreneurial decisions and earnings. We estimate a model in which agents maximize expected utility by choosing between self a...
Article
We propose a dynamic framework to study the option value of medical innovation, which accrues - in expectation - to healthy individuals who anticipate some possibility of future illness. We apply our framework to evaluate an HIV treatment breakthrough known as HAART. In lowering both the expected cost and likelihood of HIV infection, HAART reduced...
Article
Understanding factors behind the allocation of talent across firms and sectors in the investment management industry is of great importance both for the industry and the academia. The crucial role of talent in generating performance, coupled with fierce competition over talent, creates a need for a systematic empirical study of the allocation of ta...
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Full-text available
ABSTRACT We construct alternative measures of computer skill based on familiarity with software packages and programminglanguages,using High School and Beyond data. Utilizing an endogenous switching model, we find a computer wage premium of 13% - 25%, depending on the skill measure. Conditional on quantitative test scores,young black males are sign...
Article
Forward-looking agents in econometric models of choice are generally assumed to have rational expectations so that the researcher can focus on the determinants of revealed preference. However, studies in psychology and economics find evidence that individuals may have systematic biases. We develop a structural econometric framework to recover behav...
Article
We aimed to determine whether hospital-level surgical performance was similar across outpatient and inpatient settings. The majority of surgical procedures in the United States are performed in an outpatient setting but most quality improvement focuses on inpatient care. Using data from the 2006 to 2008 American College of Surgeons- National Surgic...
Article
Risk-adjusted evaluation is a key component of the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP). The purpose of this study was to improve standard ACS NSQIP risk adjustment using a novel procedure risk score. Current Procedural Terminology codes (CPTs) represented in ACS NSQIP data were assigned to 136 proc...
Article
For the 10%-15% of American married couples who experience reproductive problems, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is the leading technologically advanced treatment procedure. IVF's expense, however, may prevent many couples from receiving treatment, and those who are treated may take an overly aggressive approach in order to reduce the probability of...
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Full-text available
Geographic variations in service utilization have emerged as sentinels of quality of care. We used data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW), the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Area Resource File to examine interstate variations in psychotropic medication use among children coming into contact with child welfare ag...
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Full-text available
Scientists and engineers in small firms are far more likely than their large firm counterparts to enter entrepreneurship, a phenomenon we label the small firm effect. We explore the origins of this small firm effect, identify four classes of explanations - preference sorting, ability sorting, opportunity cost, and the possibility that workers in sm...
Article
Accurate data on costs attributable to hospital-acquired infections are needed to determine their economic impact and the cost-benefit of potential preventive strategies. To determine the attributable costs of surgical site infection (SSI) and endometritis (EMM) after cesarean section by means of 2 different methods. Retrospective cohort. Barnes-Je...
Article
Studying risk-adjusted outcomes in health care relies on statistical approaches to handling missing data. The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) provides risk-adjusted assessments of surgical programs, traditionally imputing certain missing data points using a single round of multivariable imputat...
Article
Surgical care is delivered around the clock. Elective cases within the Veterans Affairs health system starting after 4 pm appear to have an elevated risk of morbidity, but not mortality, compared with earlier cases. The relationship between operation start time and patient outcomes is not described in private-sector patients or for emergency cases....
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Full-text available
We sought to examine the extent to which children in the child welfare system receive mental health care consistent with national standards. We used data from 4 waves (3 years of follow-up) of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, the nation's first longitudinal study of children in the child welfare system, and the Area Resource...
Article
The National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) has demonstrated quality improvement in the VA and pilot study of 14 academic institutions. The objective was to show that American College of Surgeons (ACS)-NSQIP helps all enrolled hospitals. ACS-NSQIP data was used to evaluate improvement in hospitals longitudinally over 3 years (2005-200...
Article
To examine the effect of surgeon specialization on patient outcomes, controlling for volume. There is great interest in the degree to which surgical specialization affects outcomes, particularly considering drives to measure and reward quality in healthcare. Although surgical specialization has been previously analyzed with respect to outcomes, mos...
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Full-text available
Many qualified women scientists stop applying for NIH grants in the late postdoctoral and early faculty years.
Article
Despite the fact that flexible spending accounts (FSAs) are becoming an increasingly popular employer-provided health benefit, there has been very little empirical study of FSA use among employees at the individual level. This study contributes to the literature on FSAs using a unique data set that provides three years of employee-level-matched ben...
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Full-text available
We develop a theory-driven empirical framework to analyze managerial decision-making that incorporates subjective expectations data. Our goal is to recover parameters of the manager's utility function and assess the sensitivity of estimated preferences to alternative assumptions regarding the manager's expectations. We apply the model to examine th...
Article
There is increasing interest in surgical outcomes. The Patient Safety in Surgery (PSS) Study database was examined about thyroid and parathyroid procedures to determine risk factors for adverse outcomes and outcomes rates. Relative outcomes performance for the Veterans Affairs (VA) and private-sector populations was compared after risk adjustment....
Article
Many randomized experiments are plagued by attrition, even among subjects receiving more effective treatments. We estimate the subject's utility associated with the receipt of treatment, as revealed by dropout behavior, to evaluate treatment effects. Utility is a function of both "publicly observed" outcomes and side effects privately observed by t...
Article
There is increasing financial pressure to maximize clinical productivity for academic physicians. We examined whether clinical performance feedback alone could contribute to improving the clinical productivity of surgeons in an academic department of surgery. We implemented a clinical performance feedback program in January 2003. We then compared c...
Article
There is increasing interest in evaluating quality in health care, extending to the assessment of outcomes, including costs, for individual surgeons. Surgical patients entered in the private sector National Surgical Quality Improvement Program at the University of Michigan Medical Center between September 2003 and September 2004 were included. Pati...
Article
Many randomized experiments are plagued by attrition, even among subjects receiving more effective treatments. We estimate the subject's utility associated with the receipt of treatment, as revealed by dropout behavior, to evaluate treatment effects. Utility is a function of both "publicly observed" outcomes and side effects privately observed by t...
Article
Prior data have shown that resident duty-hour reform has not affected faculty work hours; yet the preservation of faculty hours may have been at the expense of productivity. We sought to examine change in clinical productivity. Anonymous survey and analysis of faculty relative value units (RVU) database. A single, large academic medical center. All...
Article
Full-text available
For the 10%-15% of American married couples who experience reproductive problems, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is the leading technologically advanced treatment procedure. Two important issues are at the center of policy debates regarding IVF markets: 1) expanding access to infertility treatment, and 2) how to encourage IVF clinics and patients to...
Article
We study how market structure influenced the diffusion of new treatment technology (ICSI) among U.S. fertility clinics that performed in vitro fertilization (IVF). We find that competitive (i.e., non-monopoly) markets were more likely to have a clinic that offered ICSI than monopoly markets. Our results account for the potential endogeneity of mark...
Article
New information technology systems at hospitals and medical centers provide administrators and policymakers with greater information than ever before on both the characteristics of patients and on the outcomes associated with individual surgeons. This paper develops a Bayesian hierarchical bivariate probit model describing surgeon performance in te...
Article
The popular press often touts workforce demographic (e.g., ethnicity and age) diversity as profit enhancing. Diversity may reduce the firm's communication costs with particular segments of customers or yield greater team problem solving abilities. On the other hand, diversity also may raise communication costs in teams thereby retarding problem-sol...
Article
Full-text available
For the 10%-15% of American married couples who experience reproductive problems, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is the leading technologically advanced treatment procedure. Two im-portant issues are at the center of policy debates regarding IVF markets: 1) expanding access to infertility treatment, and 2) encouraging IVF clinics and patients to mini...
Article
This paper identifies and evaluates rationales for team participation and for the effects of team composition on productivity using novel data from a garment plant that shifted from individual piece rate to group piece rate production over three years. The adoption of teams at the plant improved worker productivity by 14 percent on average. Product...
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Full-text available
The field of strategic management is predicated fundamentally on the idea that managements' decisions are endogenous to their expected performance implications. Yet, based on a review of more than a decade of empirical research in the Strategic Management Journal, we find that few papers econometrically correct for such endogeneity. In response, we...
Article
This paper is concerned with the problem of determining the effect of a binary treatment variable on a continuous outcome given longitudinal observational data and non-randomly assigned treatments. A general semiparametric Bayesian model (based on Dirichlet process mixing) is developed which contains potential outcomes and subject level outcome-spe...
Chapter
The fraction of US Medicare recipients enrolled in health maintenance organizations (HMOs) has increased substantially over the past 10 years. However, the impact of HMOs on health care costs is still hotly debated. In particular, it is argued that HMOs achieve cost reduction through ‘cream-skimming’ and enrolling relatively healthy patients. This...
Chapter
This paper investigates the surgical volume?outcome relationship for patients undergoing hip fracture surgery in Quebec between 1991 and 1993. Using a duration model with multiple destinations which accounts for observed and unobserved (by the researcher) patient characteristics, our initial estimates show that higher surgical volume is associated...
Article
Full-text available
especially Louis Bouchard provided excellent research assistance. The staff of the CP Rail Archives, Industrial Relations, and Pension Benefits departments, and of the Faculty of Arts Computer Laboratory, have been very helpful.
Article
This paper assesses the causal impact of late-term (8th month) maternal smoking on birthweight using data from a randomized clinical trial, in which some women were encouraged not to smoke, while others were not. The estimation of treatment effects in this case is made difficult as a result of the presence of non-compliers, women who would not chan...
Article
Two economic theories that have had an immense impact on modern strategic management research are Porter's strategic positioning framework (SPF) and Williamson's transaction cost economics (TCE). While both theories have contributed to our understanding of strategic management and to the choice of strategy and structure, each theory offers manageri...
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Full-text available
Debate continues on whether consolidation in health care markets enhances efficiency or instead facilitates market power, possibly damaging quality. We compare the quality of hospital care before and after mergers and acquisitions in California between 1992 and 1995. We analyze inpatient mortality for heart attack and stroke patients, 90-day readmi...
Article
To examine the determinants of postsurgery length of stay (LOS) and inpatient mortality in the United States (California and Massachusetts) and Canada (Manitoba and Quebec). Patient discharge abstracts from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research Nationwide Inpatient Sample and from provincial health ministries. Descriptive statistics by sta...
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Full-text available
Restricted government spending along with universal health insurance has led to longer queues for surgical procedures in Canada versus the United States. Yet it is unclear whether these treatment delays affect health outcomes. This paper tests this hypothesis by comparing the determinants of wait time for hip-fracture surgery and its impact on post...
Article
Full-text available
Possible explanations fur earnings differentials in self-employment and paid employment are investigated. The empirical results suggest that the nonpecuniary benefits of self-employment are sub-stantial: Most entrepreneurs enter and persist ill business despite the fact that they have both lower initial earnings and lower earnings growth than in pa...
Article
This paper is concerned with the problem of determining the effect of a categorical treatment variable on a response given that the treatment is non-randomly assigned and the response (on any given subject) is observed for one setting of the treatment. We consider classes of models that are designed for such problems. These models are subjected to...
Article
The fraction of US Medicare recipients enrolled in health maintenance organizations (HMOs) has increased substantially over the past 10 years. However, the impact of HMOs on health care costs is still hotly debated. In particular, it is argued that HMOs achieve cost reduction through 'cream-skimming' and enrolling relatively healthy patients. This...
Article
It is often said that the elderly in rural developing countries are more valued by the members of the society. One possible economic reason for the relative status of the elderly in rural areas is that they are likely to have accumulated substantial farm-specific capital, thus increasing the productivity of the farm. This paper examines whether the...
Article
National Health Service (NHS) reform introduced incentives for efficiency and cost effectiveness, yet little is known about their effectiveness in reducing waiting times for surgery or improving postsurgical outcomes. This paper finds that waiting times for hip fracture surgery declined after the NHS reforms and patients were more likely to be disc...
Article
Most tests of the practice-makes-perfect hypothesis have used cross-sectional data, which reveal that patients receiving surgery in high-volume hospitals tend to experience better postsurgery outcomes. This study uses longitudinal data to explicitly examine whether any given hospital's patient outcomes change as its surgery volume varies with time....
Article
Objectives. Most tests of the practice-makes-perfect hypothesis have used cross-sectional data, which reveal that patients receiving surgery in high-volume hospitals tend to experience better postsurgery outcomes. This study uses longitudinal data to explicitly examine whether any given hospital's patient outcomes change as its surgery volume varie...
Article
This paper investigates the surgical volume-outcome relationship for patients undergoing hip fracture surgery in Quebec between 1991 and 1993. Using a duration model with multiple destinations which accounts for observed and unobserved (by the researcher) patient characteristics, our initial estimates show that higher surgical volume is associated...
Article
Racial differences in professional basketball player salaries are examined to determine whether the 20% premium paid to whites in the mid-1980s has persisted into the 1990s. OLS and tobit regressions indicate no difference between white and black salaries, controlling for player and team characteristics for the 1994 - 95 season. However, censored q...
Article
This paper examines the relationship between alcohol consumption and earnings for prime-age males. Wage differentials for nondrinkers, moderate drinkers, and heavy drinkers are estimated using a polychotomous choice model, which accounts for the endogenous relationship between drinking and earnings. The authors find that moderate alcohol consumptio...
Article
This paper investigates the effect of wait time for hip fracture surgery in Canada on post-surgery length of stay in hospital and inpatient mortality. After controlling for observed and unobserved patient and hospital characteristics, pre-surgery delay has little effect on either of the two outcome variables. Patients from higher income postal-code...
Article
This paper utilizes a new panel data set of workers employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway between 1904 and 1929 to analyse the incidence of long-term employment and reasons for changes in job durations after World War I. The hazard function estimates indicate that individuals have only a small probability of staying for more than ten years at th...
Article
This paper uses a sample of employee records from the Canadian Pacific Railway to study changes between 1903 and 1938 in the composition of job separations, and the probability of separation. The proportion of voluntary departures fell by more than half after World War I. Independent competing risk, piecewise-constant hazard functions for the proba...
Article
This study investigates the value of pharmaceutical innovation, focusing on con-sumers who do not suffer from the relevant medical condition, but who anticipate (and exert some control over) the probability of future infection. In particular, we examine risky sex behavior choices of HIV− and HIV+ agents both before and after a pharmaceutical break-...

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