A Doctor Like Me: Physician-Patient Race-Match and Patient Outcomes

This paper assesses the impacts of physician-patient race-match on patient mortality. We draw on administrative data from Florida, linking hospital encounters from 2012 through 2014 to information from the Florida Physician Workforce Survey. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that physician-patient race-match reduces the likelihood of within-hospital mortality by 0.39 percentage points, a 15% reduction relative to the overall mortality rate. An alternative identification approach relying on sample restrictions to exclude endogenous physician-patient pairings yields similar results.