Effect of patient death on referrals to cardiac specialists

In this paper, I examine how patient death affects referrals from referring physicians to cardiac surgeons. I use Medicare data to identify pairs of referring physicians and cardiac surgeons who experience a patient death after a major surgical procedure to examine how these events affect referrals. I construct counterfactuals for affected pairs using pairs that experience a patient death but five quarters in the future. I find that there is a significant decline in the number of referrals and probability of a referral from the referring physician to the cardiac surgeon after the patient's death.