When Workers Travel: Nursing Supply During COVID-19 Surges / Joshua D. Gottlieb, Avi Zenilman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gottlieb, Joshua D.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Zenilman, Avi.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28240.

NBER working paper series no. w28240

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

December 2020.