Capacity Constraints and the Provision of Public Services: The Case of Workers in Public Health Clinics

Matthew Harris, Yinan Liu and Ian McCarthy

No 25706, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Unlike in the production of most goods, changes in capacity for labor-intensive services only affect outcomes of interest insofar as service providers change the way they allocate their time in response to those capacity changes. In this paper, we examine how public sector service providers respond to unexpected capacity constraints in the specific context of public health clinics. We exploit an exogenous reduction in public health clinic capacity to quantify nurses' trade-off between patients treated and time spent with each patient, which we treat as a proxy for a quality v. quantity decision. We provide evidence that these small and generally insignificant effects on nurse time favor public sector employees prioritizing quality of each interaction over clearing the patient queue.

JEL-codes: D24 I18 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lma
Note: EH LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25706.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:25706

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25706

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 ().