EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Great Escape: Physicians Leaving the Public Sector

Bertoli, P.; and Grembi, V.;

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: In many countries, public healthcare systems are facing the unprecedented challenge of attracting new physicians and retaining existing physicians. Given that the role of non economic factors in responding to such a challenge is as important as the role played by economic factors, we use outbreaks of healthcare scandals from 2000 to 2020 in approximately 100 Italian provinces to address the impact of perceived corruption on the density of public hospital physicians. The outbreak of a scandal is associated with a 3.6% decrease in the presence of public hospital physicians. The effect is explained mainly by so-called supply-side drivers, such as ethical concerns(i.e., a scandal related to a malpractice case),a lack of motivation in the workplace, concerns about the high salience of the scandal(e.g. more media coverage),and more outside options. Demand-side drivers, such as a lower level of trust on the patient side, which affects the patient distribution and, indirectly, the physician distribution, do not seem to play a crucial role within the institutional setting analyzed. Our results are robust to different staggered DID estimators, the inclusion of trends to capture potential time-varying attitudes toward corrupt behaviours, and the inclusion of variables that are expected to affect both the density of public hospital physicians and the occurrence of scandals. Healthcare scandals do not seem to affect the density of other types of civil servants, such as teachers or firefighters.

Keywords: healthcare; corruption; staggered Di-in-Di; physicians' supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 I19 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/h ... papers/2025/2503.pdf Main text (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:yor:hectdg:25/03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York HEDG/HERC, Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Rawlings ().

 
Page updated 2025-06-16
Handle: RePEc:yor:hectdg:25/03