Journal article
Nurses' labour supply elasticities: The importance of accounting for extensive margins
B Hanel, G Kalb, A Scott
Journal of Health Economics | Published : 2014
Abstract
We estimate a multi-sector model of nursing qualification holders' labour supply in different occupations. A structural approach allows us to model the labour force participation decision, the occupational and shift-type choice, and the decision about hours worked as a joint outcome following from maximising a utility function. Disutility from work is allowed to vary by occupation and also by shift type in the utility function. Our results suggest that average wage elasticities might be higher than previous research has found. This is mainly due to the effect of wages on the decision to enter or exit the profession, which was not included in the previous literature, rather than from its effe..
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Awarded by Department of Health, State Government of Victoria
Funding Acknowledgements
Funding from ARC linkage grant LP0669209 and the Victorian Department of Health is gratefully acknowledged. The paper uses the unconfidentialised unit record file from the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs' (FaHCSIA) Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. We would like to thank Richard Blundell, Deborah Cobb-Clark and Denise Doiron for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. We are also grateful for feedback and suggestions by participants at the 3rd Australasian Workshop on Econometrics & Health Economics, 2011 HILDA Conference, the Microeconometrics Workshop at the University of Melbourne, the School of Economics Seminar at the University of Sydney, and the IAB Colloquium in Nuremberg. The views expressed in this paper and any remaining errors are those of the authors solely.