Table 9.

The Impact of Malpractice on County Level Mortality.

	Timing of noneconomic damage awards and malpractice awards
	Current Year (t)	Moving average of lagged values
		t-1, t-2, t-3	t-2, t-3, t-4	t-3, t-4,t-5	t-4, t-5, t-6
		Total Deaths Per 1,000 Population
Malpractice Awards Per Capita	-0.005 (0.004)	-0.035* (0.018)	-0.026* (0.014)	-0.023** (0.010)	-0.012 (0.009)
Elasticity	-0.0036	-0.0258	-0.0192	-0.0171	-0.0094
		Deaths Per 1,000 Age 20 to 64
Malpractice Awards Per Capita	-0.004 (0.003)	-0.028** (0.011)	-0.021** (0.009)	-0.019 (0.012)	-0.017 (0.015)
Elasticity	-0.0060	-0.0457	-0.0351	-0.0328	-0.0299
		Deaths Per 1,000 Age 65 and up
Malpractice Awards Per Capita	-0.016 (0.017)	-0.112 (0.080)	-0.099 (0.063)	-0.079* (0.040)	-0.015 (0.050)
Elasticity	-0.0019	-0.0131	-0.0117	-0.0095	-0.0018

Notes: The table reports the estimated effect of per capita malpractice jury award dollars on aggregate mortality rates. Malpractice awards are instrumented by the average noneconomic awards in medical malpractice verdicts with a plaintiff win. Each coefficient is from a separate regression, and each column represents a different lag for the malpractice variable. The unit of analysis is a county-year. County population is used as a weight in all regressions. Other explanatory variables include county and year fixed-effects, a quadratic for per capita income, the percent of the population that is male, white, African-American, and that falls into 5-year age ranges. Elasticities are evaluated at the mean values of the dependent and independent variables. Robust standard errors allowing clustering at the county level are reported in parentheses. A *, **, or *** represents statistical significance at the 10, 5, or 1% level, respectively.