Physician Income Expectations and Specialty Choice / Sean Nicholson, Nicholas S. Souleles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nicholson, Sean.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Souleles, Nicholas S.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w8536.

NBER working paper series no. w8536

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical economics.

Specialism (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2001.

Cambridge, Massachusetts : National Bureau of Economic Research, 2001.

Summary:

In spite of the important role of income expectations in economics, economists know little about how people actually form these expectations. We use a unique data set that contains the explicit income expectations of medical students over a 25-year time period to examine how students form income expectations. We examine whether students condition their expectations on their own ability, contemporaneous physician income, and the ex post income of physicians in their medical school cohort. We then test whether a model that uses the students' explicit income expectations to predict their specialty choices has a better fit than a model that assumes income expectations are formed statically, and a model that bases income expectations on ex post income.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2001.