Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 15 October 2025, LG 0.423
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 15 October 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Oliver Schlenker (Ludwig Erhard ifo Center for Social Market Economy and Institutional Economics Fürth) will be talking about “The Deadly Consequences of Labor Scarcity: Evidence from Hospitals”.
More information can be found here:
Healthcare systems worldwide face increasing nursing shortages, but the consequences remain poorly understood. This paper examines how nursing shortages in hospitals affect healthcare provision and patient health, leveraging the 2011 Swiss franc stabilization. Due to wage rigidity in the German healthcare sector, cross-border commuting became more attractive for German registered nurses, causing German hospitals to lose staff based on their proximity to the border. Using rich patient- and hospital-level administrative data in a matched difference-in-differences approach, I find that German border hospitals lost, on average, 12.5% of their nursing staff. In response, hospitals reduced care intensity, leading to a decline in surgeries. While hospitals attempted to prioritize care reductions (triage), even patients with urgent medical needs experienced cutbacks, resulting in a sharp rise in mortality rates and a stagnation in life expectancy. These findings highlight the fragility of healthcare systems to labor market regulations and labor scarcity.