Nurse Unions and Patient Outcomes
Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Owen Thompson ,
Working paper
November
2013
Abstract

We estimate the impact of nurse unions on health care quality using patient discharge data and the universe of hospital unionizations in California between 1996 and 2005. We find that hospitals with a successful unionization effort outperform hospitals where such an effort fails in 12 of 13 nurse sensitive patient outcomes measures. We also find that hospitals with a unionization drive are establishments with a declining quality.

Links to Researchers