We study the problem of dynamically assigning jobs to workers with two key aspects: (i) workers gain or lose familiarity with jobs over time based on whether they are assigned or unassigned to the jobs, and (ii) the availability of workers and jobs is stochastic. This problem is motivated by applications in operating room management, where a fundamental challenge is maintaining familiarity across the workforce over time by accounting for heterogeneous worker learning rates and stochastic availability.

This paper uses two large panel data sets in China to study the effects of a health shock on household income mobility from 1991 to 2016. We compare outcomes of households with a member who receives a health shock with comparable households that do not receive any health shocks.

Healthcare services provided to patients with similar health conditions are known to vary. Standardization of healthcare delivery is a relatively new, yet hotly debated approach to address clinical variations. Previous research on process standardization in health services has focused on measuring adherence to established protocols that are available only for a limited set of disease states. We create an alternate construct that quantifies process standardization measured in terms of consistency of services rendered, and apply it to the healthcare setting using detailed nonpublic inpatient discharge data from about 35 million inpatient stays at 296 acute care hospitals in California between 2008-2016.

Supreme Court decisions on reproductive rights and affirmative action inadvertently afford the nursing profession a propitious opportunity to capitalize on the nation’s rich mosaic of iceberg demographic identities—inherited and acquired traits that may not be visibly apparent—to address pressing worker shortages and other workplace conundrums.