EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Nature of Surgeon Human Capital Depreciation

Jason Hockenberry and Lorens Helmchen

No 20017, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: To test how practice interruptions affect worker productivity, we estimate how temporal breaks affect surgeons' performance of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Using a sample of 188 surgeons who performed 56,315 CABG procedures in Pennsylvania between 2006 and 2010, we find that a surgeon's additional day away from the operating room raised patients' inpatient mortality risk by up to 0.067 percentage points (2.4% relative effect) but reduced total hospitalization costs by up to 0.59 percentage points. In analyses of 93 high-volume surgeons treating 9,853 patients admitted via an emergency department, where temporal distance effects are most plausibly exogenous, an additional day away raised mortality risk by 0.398 percentage points (11.4% relative effect) but reduced cost by up to 1.396 percentage points. These estimates imply a cost per life-year saved ranging from $7,871 to $18,500, rendering additional treatment intensity within surgery cost-effective at conventional cutoffs. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that after returning from temporal breaks surgeons may be less likely to recognize and address life-threatening complications, in turn reducing resource use. This form of human capital loss would explain the decrease in worker productivity and the simultaneous reduction in input use.

JEL-codes: I10 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published as Hockenberry, Jason M. & Helmchen, Lorens A., 2014. "The nature of surgeon human capital depreciation," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 70-80.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20017.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The nature of surgeon human capital depreciation (2014) Downloads
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:nbr:nberwo:20017

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20017

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20017