Giuseppe Moscelli, University of Surrey - Work pay, contractual changes and employee attrition

Title: Work pay, contractual changes and employee attrition: evidence from trainee doctors

Abstract: Retention of skilled workers is critical for the delivery of public services in high-stake environments such as hospital care. We study how contractual pay terms affect the retention of trainee doctors in the English NHS and the relationship between trainee doctors' attrition and hospital quality. Our setting is a nationwide reform that reduced unsocial working hours pay rates. Using a longitudinal sample and a novel linkage of administrative datasets, our quasi difference-in-difference strategy leverages the pre-reform exposure of each trainee doctor to unsocial working hours and suggests that the implementation of the new pay terms led to a 6.7% increase in the annual number of trainee doctors leaving the English NHS.  As possible mechanisms, we show that the reform was detrimental to pay satisfaction and disproportionately affected female trainee doctors. We also exploit the effect of the reform to document a positive association between trainee doctors' attrition and hospital mortality.

Presenter: Giuseppe Moscelli, University of Surrey

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