Choices among Doctors, Students and Primary Care Providers: Empirical Evidence from Sweden

Abstract

This thesis consists of three independent chapters. The setting for the first and the third chapter is the primary care sector in Sweden. The second chapter focuses on the consequences of a reform implemented in the Swedish upper secondary school system. In chapter one I study if, and how, children´s health care utilization is affected by the physician’s decision to prescribe antibiotics or not. I document underlying differences in physicians’ antibiotics prescription propensity to children and use these differences as an instrument for analysing the consequences for the individual’s utilization of health care. In the second chapter I study how a reform, aimed at increasing course-taking flexibility, affected students’ choice of courses and program as well as their third cycle educational outcomes. The third chapter focuses on how local media information about primary care centres affects the patient’s choice of primary care provider.