What Factors Affect Doctors' Hours Decisions: Comparing Structural Discrete Choice and Reduced-Form Approaches

Guyonne Kalb, Daniel Kühnle (), Anthony Scott (), Terence Cheng () and Sung-Hee Jeon
Additional contact information
Daniel Kühnle: University of Duisburg-Essen
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Daniel Kuehnle ()

No 9054, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Few papers examine the pecuniary and non-pecuniary determinants of doctors' labour supply despite substantial predicted shortages in many OECD countries. We contribute to the literature by applying both a structural discrete choice and a reduced-form approach. Using detailed survey data for Australian physicians, we examine how these different modelling approaches affect estimated wage elasticities at the intensive margin. We show that all modelling approaches predict small negative wage elasticities for male and female General Practitioners (GPs) and specialists. Our detailed subgroup analysis does not reveal particularly strong responses to wage increases by any specific group. We show that the translog and Box-Cox utility functions outperform the quadratic utility function. Exploiting the advantages of the structural discrete choice model, we examine short-term effects at the intensive margin by calculating labour supply changes in response to 5 and 10% wage increases. The results show that such wage increases substantially reduce the full-time equivalent supply of male GPs, and to a lesser extent of male specialists and female GPs, but not of female specialists.

Keywords: wage elasticity; discrete choice model; labour supply; health workforce; MABEL (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 J21 J22 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published as 'What factors affect physicians' labour supply: Comparing structural discrete choice and reduced-form approaches' in: Health Economics, 2017, 27 (2), e101 - e119

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9054.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What Factors Affect Doctors’ Hours Decisions: Comparing Structural Discrete Choice and Reduced-Form Approaches (2015)
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:dp9054

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 ().