Practice location of physicians: a discrete choice model approach

Economists and policymakers have long been concerned with increasing the supply of health professionals in rural and remote areas. This work seeks to understand which factors influence physicians’ choice of practice location right after completing residency. Differently from previous papers, we analyse the Brazilian missalocation and assess the particularities of developing countries. We use a discrete choice model approach with a multinomial logit specification. Two rich databases are employed containing the location and wage of formally employed physicians as well as details from their post-graduation. Our main findings are that amenities matter, physicians have a strong tendency to remain in the region they completed residency and salaries are significant in the choice of urban, but not rural, communities. We conjecture this is due to attachments built during training and infrastructure concerns.

On a uniform turnpike of the third kind in the Robinson-Solow-Srinivasan model

On using McKenzie’s taxonomy of optimal accumulation in the longrun, we report a “uniform turnpike” theorem of the third kind in a model original to Robinson, Solow and Srinivasan (RSS), and further studied by Stiglitz. Our results are presented in the undiscounted, discrete-time setting emphasized in the recent work of Khan-Mitra, and they rely on the importance of strictly concave felicity functions, or alternatively, on the value of a “marginal rate of transformation”, ξσ, from one period to the next not being unity. Our results, despite their specificity, contribute to the methodology of intertemporal optimization theory, as developed in economics by Ramsey, von Neumann and their followers.