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Get a Life? The Impact of the European Working Time Directive: The Case of UK Senior Doctors
Author(s) -
Dolton Peter J.,
Kidd Michael P.,
Fooken Jonas
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.3082
Subject(s) - directive , working time , anticipation (artificial intelligence) , legislation , matching (statistics) , working hours , eu countries , european union , medicine , business , demographic economics , political science , economics , labour economics , law , computer science , work (physics) , economic policy , engineering , mechanical engineering , pathology , artificial intelligence , programming language
This paper seeks to identify the effect of the implementation of the European Working Time Directive on the working hours of UK doctors. The Labour Force Survey is used to compare the working hours of doctors with a variety of control groups before and after the implementation of the directive. The controls include those unconstrained by the directive and doctor counterparts working in Europe. We use differences‐in‐differences and matching methods to estimate the impact of this natural experiment, distinguishing between the anticipation and enactment of the European Working Time Directive. We find that the legislation reduced the hours of senior doctors by around 8 hours in total including the component attributable to anticipation effects and allowing for (exogenously set) rising wages. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.