When Workers Travel: Nursing Supply During COVID-19 Surges

Joshua Gottlieb and Avi Zenilman

No 28240, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study how short-term labor markets responded to an extraordinary demand shock during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use traveling nurse jobs - a market hospitals use to fill temporary staffing needs - to examine workers' willingness to move to places with larger demand shocks. We find a dramatic increase in market size during the pandemic, especially for those specialties central to COVID-19 care. The number of jobs increased far more than compensation, suggesting that labor supply to this fringe of the nursing market is quite elastic. To examine workers' willingness to move across different locations, we examine jobs in different locations on the same day, and find an even more elastic supply response. We show that part of this supply responsiveness comes from workers' willingness to travel longer distances for jobs when payment increases, suggesting that an integrated national market facilitates reallocating workers when demand surges. This implies that a simultaneous national demand spike might be harder for the market to accommodate rapidly.

JEL-codes: I11 J22 J30 J41 J61 R20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
Note: EH LS
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