Title: How Teams Substitute Workers: Evidence form the Healthcare Sector
Abstract: "I study the effect of a team member’s temporary absence due to a health shock, on co-workers’ work hours, team size and team production using a personnel dataset from a large hospital in Italy. Using an event study design around co-worker absence as the event, I present three key findings: (i) in teams with less skill-intensive tasks, such as in teams of nurses, young co-workers increase their working hours, but old co-workers do not (internal substitution); (ii) small teams of nurses hire outsiders to cover temporary absences (external substitution); (iii) in teams with skill-intensive tasks, such as in teams of doctors, co-workers neither increase their working time nor are temporary outsiders hired. I also find that services provided by teams of doctors decrease more than those provided by teams of nurses, since in the former there is neither use internal nor external substitution. My findings suggest that individual-level health shocks, and team members’ temporary absence thereafter, are important for work teams, substitution decisions and service provision".