Faculty seminar with Jordi Blanes-Vidal

Jordi Blanes-Vidal - CV

Title: The Performance of Employees and Contractors

Abstract: 

We study how full-time employees and temporary contractors perform relative to each other, in the Emergency Department of a large Italian hospital. To identify their relative productivity, we exploit the conditional exogenous assignment of patients to doctors. We find that contractors take longer to treat patients and use more resources. Their patients are also less likely to come back to the Emergency Department. These results are amplified for cases that are handed over following the end of the doctor’s shift. Contractors are also more likely than employees to receive help from other doctors. Overall, the performance of contractors resembles the performance of student doctors (i.e. residents). These results provide the first granular comparison of workers with different types of contracts doing the exact same job.