Did UberX reduce ambulance volume?

Abstract

Ambulances are a vital part of emergency medical services. However, they come in single, high intervention form, which is at times unnecessary, resulting in excessive costs for patients and insurers. In this paper, we ask whether UberX's entry into a city caused substitution away from traditional ambulances for low‐risk patients, reducing overall volume. Using a city‐panel over‐time and leverage that UberX enter markets sporadically over multiple years, we find that UberX entry reduced the per capita ambulance volume by at least 6.7%. Our result is robust to numerous specifications.

Income and Ambulance Response Time Inequality

“…High-income areas were natural targets for companies like Uber, and recent research shows that when Uber expanded to a location, the level of ambulance use in that location dropped (possibly owing to low-severity cases substituting Uber transport for ambulance transport). 9 The results found in the study by Hsia et al 2 could be in part due to a story like this, where an external force related to both income and response times is a hidden culprit.…”

A Social Welfare Estimation of Ride-Sharing in China: Evidence From Transaction Data Analysis of a Large Online Platform

“…A result of similar result is achieved by Castillo (2020). Other studies have also fully explored a series of ways that ridesharing platforms can create social welfare, including increasing work flexibility (Hall et al, 2017;Hall & Krueger, 2018;Chen et al, 2019;Li et al, 2021), enhancing ridership (Sadowsky & Nelson, 2107;Grahn et al, 2021), reducing drunk driving (Greenwood & Wattal, 2017;Athey & Luca, 2019), increasing entrepreneurship and economists employment (Burtch et al, 2016), promoting local consumption (Zhang & Li, 2017), reducing sexual harassment and bias (Park et al, 2017;Ge et al, 2020;Mejia & Parker, 2021), reducing private car ownership (Gong et al, 2017), reducing information cost and road congestion (Shapiro, 2018;Goldfarb & Tucker, 2019;Moskatel & Slusky, 2019;Liu et al, 2021), etc. Certain negative evidence is also suggested by the literature, such as decreasing of incumbent taxi drivers' income and that of the entering ride-hailing drivers (Berger et al, 2018;Zoepf et al, 2018).…”

The Demand for Mobility: Evidence from an Experiment with Uber Riders

“…Our paper also builds on a growing set of economic studies of the impacts of ridehailing markets (Goldszmidt et al, 2020, Alvarez and Argente, 2020, Leard and Xing, 2020, Young and Farber, 2019, Castillo, 2019, Moskatel and Slusky, 2019, Hall et al, 2018, Cohen et al, 2016. Thus far, the ride-hailing literature has relied heavily upon observational or stated-preferences methods.…”