Table 2.

Unweighted and Population-Weighted Means for Malpractice Variables.

	Single Year		3-Year Moving Average
	Unweighted	Weighted	Unweighted	Weighted
County-Level Means
Total Malpractice Awards (thousands)	2,949 (12,718)	16,837 (26,590)	2,772 (10,053)	16,613 (21,198)
Malpractice Awards Per Capita (dollars)	2.87 (18.06)	6.07 (14.57)	2.04 (7.96)	5.77 (8.87)
Verdict-Level Means
Average Noneconomic Award: All Cases (thousands)	142 (530)	312 (593)	105 (299)	292 (425)
Average Economic Award: All Cases (thousands)	328 (2,465)	634 (1,656)	200 (430)	585 (514)
Average Noneconomic Award: Malpractice Cases (thousands)	173 (803)	501 (1,120)	117 (484)	445 (740)
Average Economic Award: Malpractice Cases (thousands)	377 (2,691)	1,096 (2,646)	286 (885)	1,050 (1,446)
N	1,785		1,547

Notes: The table presents means (standard deviations in parentheses) of the average total jury awards in medical malpractice cases, average total malpractice awards per capita, average award for noneconomic damages in all tort cases with a plaintiff victory (defined as a nonzero damage award), and the total amount of awards in all tort cases. The unit of analysis is a county-year, or a verdict, as appropriate. Data come from the RAND JVDB, and include all counties in New York and California, as well as Cook County, IL (Chicago), King County, WA (Seattle), Harris County, TX (Houston) and all counties in the St. Louis, MO metropolitan area. The columns reporting lagged data represent the average of three years of lags. Data are available in the JVDB for 120 counties covering 15 years (1985-1999), but 2 years of data are lost to compute the 3-year moving average.