ArticleJournal of empirical legal studies2019
Damage Caps and Defensive Medicine: Reexamination with Patient-Level Data.
Article in Journal of empirical legal studies, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- How defensive medicine is defined in European medical literature: a systematic review.BMJ open · 2022Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Changes in Maternal Care and Infant Health After Noneconomic Damage Cap Repeals.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Recommendations for microbiological sampling in infected hard-to-heal wounds: an Italian association for cutaneous ulcers (AIUC) perspective.Frontiers in surgery · 2026Review
- Evaluating the impact of 2011 tort reform limiting noneconomic damages in North Carolina and Tennessee on testing, imaging, and procedure utilization.Health services research · 2025Article
- The Chinese version of Defensive Medicine Scale (DMS): reliability and validity test among physicians.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Policy Options for Reducing Defensive Medicine Behaviors: A Multi-Method Study.Medical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran · 2024Article
- Emergency Department and Urgent Care Medical Malpractice Claims 2001-15.The western journal of emergency medicine · 2021Article
- Defensive Medicine: Evidence from Military Immunity.American economic journal. Economic policy · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Physicians often claim that they practice "defensive medicine," including ordering extra imaging and laboratory tests, due to fear of malpractice liability. Caps on noneconomic damages are the principal proposed remedy. Do these caps in fact reduce testing, overall health-care spending, or both? We study the effects of "third-wave" damage caps, adopted in the 2000s, on specific areas that are expected to be sensitive to med mal risk: imaging rates, cardiac interventions, and lab and radiology spending, using patient-level data, with extensive fixed effects and patient-level covariates. We find heterogeneous effects. Rates for the principal imaging tests
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Registered trials
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