Tuesday 12 November 2024 12:55 - 14:00

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

About this event

Modern knowledge-intensive work involves significant specialization (Jones 2009) and is often coordinated using knowledge hierarchies (Garicano 2000), where experts handle the most specialized tasks, leaving more common tasks to other workers. Deciding how to divide up the tasks is an important production decision for organizations, such as firms and governments. But these decisions on the division of labour are often made without clear market signals about the comparative advantage of workers in different occupations. Hence, we have relatively little evidence on whether the division of labour is efficient. In this project we investigate the knowledge hierarchy formed by doctors and nurses, where the nurses resolve some cases themselves and direct others to the doctors. Understanding whether this knowledge hierarchy is efficient is important, since healthcare typically involves considerable public expenditures, which are rising as societies age and more treatments become available. To shed light on these issues, we use new data on hundreds of thousands of patient cases from a Swedish healthcare provider. Patients are usually assigned to online doctors, but due to temporary congestion (within a calendar day) some are instead directed to online nurses, generating plausibly exogenous variation in task assignment between the two types of workers. We can observe the resulting flow of patients through the healthcare system, along with their health outcomes and costs. This allows us to assess the absolute and comparative advantage of doctors and nurses in various tasks, and study whether the allocation of tasks between them is efficient or allows for improvements, potentially resulting in better health outcomes and costs savings. Our project differs substantively from a recent head-to-head comparison of doctors and nurse practitioners in the US (Chan and Chen 2022). In our setting, nurses do not compete with doctors, since they cannot prescribe or refer to specialists; instead, nurses and doctors form a knowledge hierarchy, and we examine what an efficient allocation between them may entail.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

Labour Markets Workshops are part of the CEP's Labour Markets programme.