Nurses' Labour Supply Elasticities: The Importance of Accounting for Extensive Margins

Barbara Hanel (), Guyonne Kalb and Anthony Scott ()
Additional contact information
Barbara Hanel: Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research
Anthony Scott: Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research

No 6573, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Many countries face a continuing shortage in nurses' labour supply. Previous research suggests that nurses respond only weakly to changes in wages. We estimate a multi-sector model of nursing qualification holders' labour supply in different occupations. A structural approach allows us to model the labour force participation decision, the occupational and shift-type choice, and the decision about hours worked as a joint outcome following from maximizing a utility function. Disutility from work is allowed to vary by occupation and also by shift type in the utility function. Furthermore, we allow the preference parameters in the utility function to vary by certain family characteristics and personality. Our results suggest that average wage elasticities might be higher than previous research has found. This is mainly due to the effect of wages on the decision to enter or exit the profession, which was not included in the previous literature, rather than from its effect on increased working hours for those who already work in the profession. We find that the negative labour supply elasticities with respect to income are higher for nurses with children, while the positive elasticities with respect to wages are higher for low-qualified, older and childless nurses. Elasticities do not appear to vary by personality trait.

Keywords: wage elasticities; nursing; labour supply; shift work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I11 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Journal of Health Economics, 2014, 33, 94-112.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6573.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Nurses’ labour supply elasticities: The importance of accounting for extensive margins (2014)
Working Paper: Nurses' Labour Supply Elasticities: The Importance of Accounting for Extensive Margins (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6573

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().