Scholars@Duke
Ryan Carty McDevitt

Ryan Carty McDevitt

Professor of Business Administration
Fuqua School of Business

Selected Publications

Provision of transplant education for patients starting dialysis: Disparities persist.

Journal Article Heliyon · September 15, 2024 BACKGROUND: All patients starting dialysis should be informed of kidney transplant as a renal replacement therapy option. Prior research has shown disparities in provision of this information. In this study, we aimed to identify patient sociodemographic an ... Full text Link to item Cite

The timing and location of entry in growing markets: subgame perfection at work

Journal Article RAND Journal of Economics · June 1, 2024 We develop and analyze a dynamic model in which firms decide when and where to enter a growing market. We do not pre-specify the order of entry, allowing instead for the leader and follower to be determined endogenously. We characterize the subgame perfect ... Full text Cite

Physicians as Owners and Agents-A Call for Further Study.

Journal Article JAMA internal medicine · December 2022 Full text Cite

Assessment of Spending for Patients Initiating Dialysis Care.

Journal Article JAMA network open · October 2022 ImportanceDespite a widespread belief that private insurers spend large amounts on health care for enrollees receiving dialysis, data limitations over the past decade have precluded a comprehensive analysis of the topic.ObjectiveTo examin ... Full text Cite

Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: Variation in Regional Political Preferences Predicted New Prescriptions after President Trump's Endorsement.

Journal Article Journal of health politics, policy and law · August 2022 ContextOn March 19, 2020, President Donald Trump endorsed using hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 treatment despite inconclusive evidence of the drug's effectiveness. This study sought to understand the influence of political preferences on prescrip ... Full text Cite

Association Between Hospital Private Equity Acquisition and Outcomes of Acute Medical Conditions Among Medicare Beneficiaries.

Journal Article JAMA network open · April 2022 ImportanceAs private equity (PE) acquisitions of short-term acute care hospitals (ACHs) continue, their impact on the care of medically vulnerable older adults remains largely unexplored.ObjectiveTo investigate the association between PE ... Full text Cite

Private Equity Acquisition And Responsiveness To Service-Line Profitability At Short-Term Acute Care Hospitals.

Journal Article Health affairs (Project Hope) · November 2021 As private equity firms continue to increase their ownership stake in various health care sectors in the US, questions arise about potential impacts on the organization and delivery of care. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we investigated chang ... Full text Cite

How Acquisitions Affect Firm Behavior and Performance: Evidence from the Dialysis Industry

Journal Article Quarterly Journal of Economics · February 1, 2020 Many industries have become increasingly concentrated through mergers and acquisitions, which in health care may have important consequences for spending and outcomes. Using a rich panel of Medicare claims data for nearly one million dialysis patients, we ... Full text Cite

Strategic Patient Discharge: the Case of Long-Term Care Hospitals.

Scholarly Edition · November 2018 Medicare's prospective payment system for long-term acute-care hospitals (LTCHs) provides modest reimbursements at the beginning of a patient's stay before jumping discontinuously to a large lump-sum payment after a prespecified number of days. We show tha ... Full text Cite

School spirit: Legislator school ties and state funding for higher education

Journal Article Journal of Public Economics · August 1, 2018 We explore a new mechanism to understand state funding for public colleges and universities by leveraging data on the educational experiences of state legislators, specifically if and where they received postsecondary education. Using novel, hand-collected ... Full text Cite

Productivity and quality in health care: Evidence from the dialysis industry

Journal Article Review of Economic Studies · January 1, 2017 We show that healthcare providers face a tradeoffbetween increasing the number of patients they treat and improving their quality of care. To measure the magnitude of this quality-quantity tradeoff, we estimate a model of dialysis provision that explicitly ... Full text Cite

The effect of social interaction on economic transactions: Evidence from changes in two retail formats

Journal Article Management Science · December 1, 2015 Examining changes in two different retail formats, we show that consumers alter their purchases depending on the retail environment. In both settings, the change in behavior coincides with a reduction in the interpersonal interaction required to complete a ... Full text Cite

Specialization and Competition in the Venture Capital Industry

Journal Article Review of Industrial Organization · June 1, 2015 An important type of product differentiation in the venture capital (VC) market is industry specialization. We estimate a market structure model to assess competition among VCs—some of which specialize in a particular industry and others of which are gener ... Full text Cite

Market structure and gender disparity in health care: Preferences, competition, and quality of care

Journal Article RAND Journal of Economics · March 1, 2014 We consider the relationship between market structure and health outcomes in a setting where patients have stark preferences: urology patients disproportionately match with a urologist of the same gender. In the United States, however, fewer than 6% of uro ... Full text Cite

"A" business by any other name: Firm name choice as a signal of firm quality

Journal Article Journal of Political Economy · January 1, 2014 This paper considers when a firm's deliberately chosen name can signal meaningful information. The average plumbing firm whose name begins with A or a number receives five times more service complaints than other firms and also charges higher prices. Relat ... Full text Cite

Names and reputations: An empirical analysis

Journal Article American Economic Journal: Microeconomics · August 1, 2011 This paper tests several predictions from the literature on firm reputation, and confirms a main result: poor performance leads a firm to conceal its reputation. A residential plumbing firm with a record of complaints one standard deviation above the mean ... Full text Cite

The broadband bonus: Estimating broadband Internets economic value

Journal Article Telecommunications Policy · August 1, 2011 How much economic value did broadband Internet create? Despite the importance of this question for national policy, no research has estimated broadbands incremental contribution to U.S. GDP by calibrating against historical adoption and incorporating count ... Full text Cite

Evidence of a modest price decline in US broadband services

Journal Article Information Economics and Policy · June 1, 2011 In this paper, we construct a consumer price index for broadband services in the United States using over 1500 service contracts offered by DSL and cable providers from 2004 through 2009. This exercise frames a range of open questions about measuring price ... Full text Cite