Minke Remmerswaal is a PhD candidate at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She works financing of mental health care and cost-sharing in health care. She is also employed as a researcher at the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) in The Hague.

Do altruistic providers have better treatment outcomes? 

We study heterogeneity in provider altruism among self-employed mental health care providers in the Netherlands. Using a large administrative data set, we exploit the discontinuities in the compensation scheme to separate altruistically motivated providers from financially motivated providers. We find strong heterogeneity in provider altruism. Moreover, we find that more altruistically motivated providers treat mental health patients for shorter duration and report better treatment outcomes, as measured by the improvement in Global Assessment of Functioning. These results suggest that provider altruism is positively related to treatment outcomes.