A weird story on Bloomberg (see here) describes an unintended consequence of parental leave policies in Denmark. "People die." Why? It is because nurses tend to be female and young and have babies. So, the parental leave policy has created a shortage of nurses.
Nurses, who skew female, provide a lot of vital health care, and made
heavy use of Denmark’s new paid family leave benefit when it passed in
1994. Since the supply of nurses was limited, and their skills could not
easily be replaced, hospital readmissions went up, and more
troublingly, mortality spiked among elderly patients in nursing homes.
Advocates
of paid parental leave are no doubt bristling at the implication that
their favorite benefit might kill people. But that’s not quite the right
implication to take away from this paper. What it really highlights is
how difficult it is to know how a given policy will turn out. Had
officials understood that in advance, they might have taken steps to
mitigate the effects -- such as training extra nurses beforehand. The
problem, in other words, wasn’t necessarily family leave policy, but the
limited visibility policymakers have into the outcomes of their plans.
The big takeaway is that labor is not undifferentiated lump and that different policies will have unintended consequences no matter what policymakers do.
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