Three essays on healthcare markets and political economy

This dissertation examines three important topics in healthcare and political economy. The unifying theme behind this dissertation is to examine the process of getting a job and keeping a job in health and political labor markets.;The first paper, co-authored with Dov Rothman, shows that financial constraints, as measured by parental wealth, impact physician's choice of whether to become self-employed or not. We find that an increase in parental wealth is associated with an increase in the probability that an individual is self-employed. We also find suggestive evidence that financial constraints do not seem to impact the probability that a physician buys into an existing practice. Financial constraints only prevent physicians from starting new practices. We then look at the mechanisms that underlie this relationship using free-response survey questions. We find no evidence that wealthy parents shape the preferences of their children in a way that makes them more inclined to become self-employed. This suggests that financial constraints and not preferences deter entry into self-employment. Finally we show that self-employed physicians tend to earn much more than their employee counterparts.;In a second study, co-authored with Ernesto Dal Bo and Pedro Dal Bo, we document persistence in the attainment of political power by members of the same family. Using a sample of United States legislators for the period 1788-1996, we find that legislators that enjoy longer tenures are significantly more likely to have relatives entering Congress later on. We investigate the possibility that this association is not just driven by fixed family characteristics but that it reflects the fact that power attainment creates forces that impact on the subsequent dynastic success. We use instrumental variables and show that representatives that have longer careers are more likely to have relatives entering Congress, suggesting that self-perpetuating forces shape the political class.;In a third study I test whether votes are counted in an unbiased manner. I find that in U.S. House elections this is not the case. I employ a novel approach to detect this biasing behavior in vote counting by looking at extremely close elections where the outcome between any two candidates should be random. I find that in extremely close elections the incumbent wins markedly more often than would be expected. This suggests that the vote counting process is biased in favor of incumbents in a manner that is dependent on incumbency advantages that exist in electoral process after the election has taken place. Importantly this is not necessarily due to out-right fraud, but could be due to the fact that incumbents are better able to resolve elections in their favor using courts and other means. This allows incumbents to retain their jobs even when they are not expected to do so.