Denise Doiron

The Impact of Unionization on Male-Female Earnings Differences in Canada

The impact of unionization on male-female earnings differences in Canada is analyzed using data spanning 1981 to 1988, a period in which the male-female unionization gap narrowed considerably. Gender differences in union density, union wages, and nonunion wages are decomposed into characteristics-related and discriminatory components. We find that the drop in the gender unionization gap prevented an increase of 7 percent in the overall wage differential between men and women. Also, male-female earnings differences in the nonunion sector make a substantially larger contribution to the gender earnings gap than do those in the union sector.

Inequality in Male and Female Earnings: The Role of Hours and Wages

The authors decompose annual earnings into hours of work and hourly earnings and analyze male-female differences in earnings inequality using Canadian data. Their results indicate that the larger female inequality in earnings is due to a greater inequality in the distribution of hours of work. The distributions of wages for men and women are either statistically indistinguishable or more equal for women. The authors compare two data points, 1988 and 1981, and find the same structure in the gender comparisons. Also, changes between 1988 and 1981 in earnings inequality are generated from movements in the hours distributions. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.

Working part time: by choice or by constraint

The selection of workers into part-time jobs and the wages they earn are analysed using the 1989 Labour Market Activity Survey. We focus on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary part-time workers, since involuntary part-time workers earn substantially lower wages than other workers. We find that the selection of individuals into involuntary part-time work is more closely tied to job characteristics than personal or human capital characteristics. The lower wage earned by involuntary part-time workers is largely due to differences in returns and selection effects, rather than differences in endowments.

Lay-Offs as Signals: The Canadian Evidence

In R. Gibbons and L. F. Katz (1991), the signaling content of layoffs and the resulting costs to the displaced workers are investigated. Evidence of this signaling effect is found among displaced workers in the United States. In this paper, a similar exercise is conducted using Canadian data, which are better in several respects: they provide information on union status, search activity, and more accurate measures of postdisplacement salaries and displacement length. Results show evidence of a signaling effect in white-collar occupations but not in blue-collar jobs regardless of union status. Also, signaling effects persist for the first three years in the postdisplacement job.

Demand for Childcare Services and Labour Supply in Australian Families

This article provides empirical findings on non-parental childcare use and simulates the effect of childcare costs on labour supply in Australia.

Is there a crisis in nursing retention in New South Wales

BackgroundThere is a severe shortage of nurses in Australia. Policy makers and researchers are especially concerned that retention levels of nurses in the health workforce have worsened over the last decade. There are also concerns that rapidly growing private sector hospitals are attracting qualified nurses away from the public sector. To date no systematic analysis of trends in nursing retention rates over time has been conducted due to the lack of consistent panel data.ResultsA 1.4 percentage point improvement in retention has led to a 10% increase in the overall supply of nurses in NSW. There has also been a substantial aging of the workforce, due to greater retention and an increase in mature age entrants. The improvement in retention is found in all types of premises and is largest in nursing homes. There is a substantial amount of year to year movement in and out of the workforce and across premises. The shortage of nurses in public hospitals is due to a slowdown in entry rather than competition from the rapidly growing private sector hospitals.Policy ImplicationsThe finding of an improvement (rather than a worsening) in retention suggests that additional improvements may be difficult to achieve as further retention must involve individuals more and more dissatisfied with nursing relative to other opportunities. Hence policies targeting entry such as increased places in nursing programs and additional subsidies for training costs may be more effective in dealing with the workforce shortage. This is also the case for shortages in public sector hospitals as retention in nursing is found to be relatively high in this sector. However, the large amount of year to year movements across nursing jobs, especially among the younger nurses, also suggests that policies aimed at reducing job switches and increasing the number who return to nursing should also be pursued. More research is needed in understanding the relative importance of detailed working conditions and the problems associated with combining family responsibilities and nursing jobs.

The Use of Alternative Preference Elicitation Methods in Complex Discrete Choice Experiments

We analyse stated preference data over nursing jobs collected from two different discrete choice experiments: a multi-profile case best-worst scaling experiment (BWS) prompting selection of the best and worst among alternative jobs, and a profile case BWS wherein the respondents choose the best and worst job attributes. The latter allows identification of additional utility parameters and is believed to be cognitively easier. Results suggest that respondents place greater value on pecuniary over non-pecuniary gains in the multi-profile case. There is little evidence that this discrepancy is induced by the extra cognitive burden of processing several profiles at once in the multi-profile case. We offer thoughts on other likely mechanisms.

Nurses' Retention and Hospital Characteristics in New South Wales

Nursing shortages are commonly observed features of hospital systems in Australia, Europe and the United States. To date there has been very little research on the effects of hospital characteristics on the retention of the nursing staff. In this paper we match individual data on registered nurses (RNs) working in the public sector in NSW in 1996 to the hospital in which they work. We analyze the annual retention probability for these RNs using the nurses? personal characteristics as well as the characteristics of the hospitals. It is found that the type of hospital per se does not help explain the retention probability of the nurses employed in the premise but the hospital characteristics do. Hospital characteristics include measures of size, complexity, intensity, expenditures and staffing levels. The results suggest that the effects of these variables are complex. For example, complexity of the work as measured by admissions from emergency increase retention while high cost procedures and large ANDRG weights reduce retention. Higher levels of expenditures (at constant staffing levels) increase retention except for expenditures on visiting medical officers which reduce retention. The effects on the expected retention probability are very large and significant. One implication of our findings is that simply increasing staffing levels is unlikely to achieve much impact on nurses? retention levels unless problem areas of the job are also addressed.

Does self-assessed health measure health?

Despite concerns about reporting biases and interpretation, self-assessed health (SAH) remains the measure of health most used by researchers, in part reflecting its ease of collection and in part the observed correlation between SAH and objective measures of health. Using a unique Australian data set, which consists of survey data linked to administrative individual medical records, we present empirical evidence demonstrating that SAH indeed predicts future health, as measured by hospitalizations, out-of-hospital medical services and prescription drugs. Our large sample size allows very disaggregate analysis and we find that SAH predicts more serious, chronic illnesses better than less serious illnesses. Finally, we compare the predictive power of SAH relative to administrative data and an extensive set of self-reported health measures; SAH does not add to the predictive power of future utilization when the administrative data is included and improves prediction only marginally when the extensive survey-based health measures are included. Clearly there is value in the more extensive survey and administrative health data as well as greater cost of collection.

Job preferences of students and new graduates in nursing

This article investigates the preferences of student and newly graduated nurses for pecuniary and nonpecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. It is the first study applying methods based on discrete choice experiments to a developed country nursing workforce. It is also the first to focus on the transition through university training and into work. This is particularly important as junior nurses have the lowest retention levels in the profession. We sample 526 individuals from nursing programmes in two Australian universities. Flexible and newly developed models combining heteroscedasticity with unobserved heterogeneity in scale and preference weights are estimated. Overall, salary remains the most important feature in increasing the probability that a job will be selected. ‘Supportive management/staff’ and ‘quality of care’ follow as the most important attributes from a list of 11 nonpecuniary characteristics. However, the subset of new graduates rank ‘supportive management/staff’ above salary increases, emphasizing the importance of a supportive workplace in the transition from university to the workplace. We find substantial preference heterogeneity and some attributes, such as the opportunity for clinical rotations, are found to be attractive to some nurses while seen as negative by others. Nursing retention could be improved by designing different employment packages to appeal to these different tastes.