Description:

Lydia Cao: "Hospital Mergers and Physician Allocation":
Abstract:  In this project, we study the impact of hospital mergers on the organization of physician workforce in the U.S., and provide empirical evidence on the potential synergy effect of mergers on physicians’ labor output. We aim to examine the reallocation of physicians across facilities and tasks following mergers, and connect the observed patterns to intermediary productivity measures, such as number of patients seen and revenue per physician. Using publicly available data on physicians’ working facilities for Traditional Medicare patients, we found that: 1) after hospitals merged, more physicians simultaneously work at merged hospital pairs; 2) the increase in shared physicians is more visible for specialties that tend to be employed by hospitals instead of private practice; 3) physicians who simultaneously work at merged hospitals see more patients and bill more for total reimbursement. We argue the last finding is likely driven mainly by the reallocation of physicians across facilities, as opposed to the direct treatment effect of mergers within facilities. For the next steps, we plan to use insurance claims data to further explore the effect of hospital mergers on the allocation of physicians across patients/tasks.

Sebastián Poblete: "How much unions can offset labor market power?":
Abstract: Exercise of labor market power has been a rising concern for policymakers and economists. In this project, I want to use Chilean administrative data on wages, production and union affiliation and legal strikes to quantify the extent of which unions can (or can't) act as a remedy to wage markdowns. To do so, I propose a model of wage setting and bargaining which nests the cases of monopsony wage setting and the union distributing all revenue of the firm among workers on the extremes of bargaining power. In the presentation, I aim to discuss the data sources, the model structure and potential identification strategies.