Vortragssitzung

Labour and Education

Talks

Deciding to Leave: The Brexit, EU Nurse Withdrawal, and Health Care Quality
Kai Fischer, DICE, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Einleitung / Introduction

Abstract: Most Western healthcare systems rely on foreign medical staff to handle the everrising demand for health workers. We analyze the contribution of foreign health workers to the performance of a country’s public health system. We exploit the decline of EU nurses in England’s National Health Service (NHS) after the Brexit referendum. We find hospital providers with a higher share of EU nurses before the referendum to on average face more hospital-related deaths, to conduct fewer diagnostic tests and to host less intensive care patients. Readmissions of patients within 30 days after discharge become more likely. As mechanisms, we identify a changing composition of the workforce instead of an actual deficit in the labor force. We argue that the found effects are driven by a deterioration in health care quality instead of capacity constraints.

Methode / Method

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Authors
Kai Fischer, DICE, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
The effect of education on chronic illness
Christoph Kronenberg, CINCH, University Duisburg-Essen

Einleitung / Introduction

The global disease burden is shifting from communicable to non-communicable diseases. Deaths from non-communicable diseases are delayable and reducing them is part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, little is known about whether increasing education reduces the probability of having non-communicable diseases. We address this gap by exploiting exogenous variation in schooling caused by changes in school-leaving age policies in six European countries and Australia. We find that the results vary by disease and country. Increased education reduces the probability of having cataracts by about 3% or around 10% for circulatory conditions in all countries we analyze. In contrast, for other conditions, such as cancer, a reduction is observed in some countries but not in others, and for some conditions, such as ulcers, fractures and mental illness, the results are economically meaningless and statistically insignificant.


Authors
Davide Dragone, University of Bologna
Eugenio Zucchelli, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid