Prof. Andreas Steinmayr, Ph.D.

Vaccine-skeptic Physicians and Patient Vaccination Decisions

What is the role of general practitioners (GPs) in supporting or hindering public health efforts? Andreas Steinmayr and Manuel Rossi have investigated the influence of vaccine-skeptic GPs on their patients' decisions to get a COVID-19 vaccination. They identified vaccine-skeptic GPs from the signatories of an open letter in which 199 Austrian physicians expressed their skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines. They examined small rural municipalities where patients choose a GP primarily based on geographic proximity. These vaccine-skeptic GPs reduced the vaccination rate by 5.6 percentage points. This estimate implies that they discouraged 7.9 percent of the vaccinable population. The effect appears to stem from discouragement rather than from rationing access to the vaccine.

Mr. Steinmayr’s research interests are in applied microeconometrics, labor economics, economics of migration, and economics of education. In particular, he is interested in the consequences of migration for migrant-sending countries and in interaction effects between sending and receiving countries. He also analyzes policies to improve the well-being of labor migrants using large-scale field experiments. He has a strong focus on causal inference and econometric methods.

Andreas Steinmayr is Professor of Empirical Economic Research at the University of Innsbruck. He completed his PhD in Economics and Finance at the University of St. Gallen. During and after his PhD, he spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. From 2015 to 2020 he held the position of an Assistant Professor at LMU Munich. Mr. Steinmayr is a CESifo Research Network Affiliate and an IZA Research Fellow.