Relative Quality of Foreign Nurses in the United States
2012/11/06
研討會日期 : 2012-11-06
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Jessica Pan
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Jessica Pan received her Ph.D. in Business Economics from University of Chicago in 2010. She is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Economics at National University of Singapore. Her research field is in labor economics, economics of education, and immigration.
演講摘要 : The share of foreign educated nurses working in the US has increased rapidly over the last few decades and the Philippines has emerged as the single largest source of nurses educated abroad, representing more than half of foreign nurses entering the US in the last decade. This paper analyzes the relative quality of foreign nurses and its evolution over time using Census data from 1980 to 2010 and wages as a measure of skill. We find a positive wage premium for nurses educated in the Philippines, but not for foreign nurses educated elsewhere. The premium peaked at 8% in 2000, and decreased to 4% in 2010. This premium cannot be explained by differences in demographics, education, location, or detailed job characteristics. The assimilation profile of Filipino nurses and the types of hospitals that hire them strongly suggest that the premium reflects quality differences and not just unobserved characteristics of the job that carry a higher wage but are unrelated to skill. We provide some evidence that the wage premium is likely to be driven by strong positive selection into nursing among Filipinos resulting from the high and heterogenous returns to the occupation generated by active government support for the migration of nurses in the Philippines. Finally, we find some suggestive evidence that the quality of native nurses declined for cohorts entering the labor market during the 1990s and recovered somewhat starting in the early 2000s, coinciding with the peak of the wage premium for Filipino nurses in 2000 and its further decline in 2010.
