arXiv 3 Jan 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2601.01149 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Normal care units (NCU) placement affects health outcomes. NCUs in a hospital have different specialisations. There are patients that can potentially stay in multiple different NCUs. On a given day the NCUs are on different utilisation levels, which also affects health outcomes. Our approach uses instrumental variable causal forests, with emergency admission as an instrument, to estimate how the effect of NCU placement varies across patients and utilisation levels. The results show a clear trade-off between specialisation and utilization. Based on these findings, we design a minimax regret placement policy, using frequentist, Balke-Pearl and Manski bounds, that lowers mortality without capacity expansion. The policy reallocates patients according to their individualized average treatment effects, showing that data-driven patient placement can improve outcomes by using existing resources more efficiently.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Athey, Susan and Imbens, Guido W (2019) Machine learning methods that economists should know about | 0.928 | 4 | 3 | 100% |
| 2 | Wager, Stefan and Athey, Susan (2018) Estimation and inference of heterogeneous treatment effects using random forests | 0.874 | 8 | 2 | 100% |
| 3 | Athey, S. and Imbens, G. W (2016) Recursive Partitioning for Heterogeneous Causal Effects | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 4 | Balke, Alexander and Pearl, Judea (1997) Bounds on treatment effects from studies with imperfect compliance | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Manski, Charles F (1990) Nonparametric bounds on treatment effects | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Rubin, Donald B (1974) Estimating causal effects of treatments in randomized and nonrandomized studies. | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Breiman, Leo (2001) Random forests | 0.585 | 3 | 1 | 100% |
| 8 | Boyle, Justin and Zeitz, Kathryn and Hoffman, Richard and Khanna, Sa… (2013) Probability of severe adverse events as a function of hospital occupancy | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
| 9 | Wise, Jacqui (2015) Cutting medical bed occupancy is linked to reduced patient mortality in UK hospital, study shows | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Abir, Mahshid and Goldstick, Jason and Malsberger, Rosalie and Bauho… (2020) The association between hospital occupancy and mortality among Medicare patients | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 53 scored citations.