WHU – Working Paper Series in Economics
ISSN 2511-1159
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- Arbeitskräftemangel (1)
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WP 19/02
Nursing without caring?
(2019)
We know that existing professions in the health care sector value work environment and job conditions to a great extent. However, we are also witnessing an expansion of new roles into the health care sector, many of which substitutie the tasks of existing professions. This may be efficient, in that it releases professionals’ time. However, there is little understanding of what motivates these new professions in entering or remaining in these newly created roles. This study tries to evaluate the preference structure of one of these new staff groups, surgical technologist, through examining the preferences of trainees, defined over a number of attributes, in this group. The DCE study covers 80% of the target population. The results show a vigorous disfavour towards any perceived nursing job characteristics such as caring activities, hierarchical work environment or shift types. The results inform policy makers and hospital manager about the importance to focus not only on the nursing profession but also to take into account the existence of a group of people who is willing to work within the health care system however, associated with strong preferences against nursing activities, especially caring. Implementing and further development of new and specialised profession through reallocating former nursing tasks- should be considered while coping with labour shortage.
WP 19/01
This paper examines the role of uncertainty in the context of the business cycle in the Eurozone. To gain a more granular perspective on uncertainty, the paper decomposes uncertainty along two dimensions: First, we construct the four different moments of uncertainty, including the point estimate, the standard deviation, the skewness and the kurtosis. The second dimension of uncertainty spans along three distinct groups of economic agents, including consumers, corporates and financial markets. Based on this taxonomy, we construct uncertainty indices and assess the impact on real GDP via impulse response functions and further investigate their informational value in rolling out-of-sample GDP forecasts. The analysis lends evidence to the hypothesis that higher uncertainty expressed through the point estimate, a larger standard deviation among confidence estimates, positive skewness and a higher kurtosis are all negatively correlated with the business cycle. The impulse response functions reveal that in particular the first and the second moment of uncertainty cause a permanent effect on GDP with an initial decline and a subsequent overshoot. We find uncertainty in the corporate sector to be the main driver behind this observation, followed by financial markets’ uncertainty whose initial effect on GDP is comparable but receding much faster. While the first two moments of uncertainty improve GDP forecasts significantly, both the skewness and the kurtosis do not augment the forecast quality any further.