Judit Vall Castelló is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Barcelona and a researcher at IZA and CRES-UPF. Previously, she was the director of research at this same center and a professor at the University of Girona. As an applied economist, she specializes in policy evaluation in the fields of health economics and labor economics, and has collaborated on international projects with NBER, UNICEF, and the University of Cambridge. She has taught at various universities in Spain, the Netherlands, and Mexico. She earned her PhD from Maastricht University in 2010 as a Marie Curie fellow and later received the Robert Solow postdoctoral fellowship at UPF. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Essex, the Toulouse School of Economics, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a Fulbright-Schuman fellowship.

Lucía Cobreros she is an applied economist specialized in Policy Evaluation, with a particular interest in Education Economics, Health Economics, Gender Economics, and Labor Economics. She graduated in Economics from the University of Cantabria and complemented her education with a Master's in Industrial Economics and Markets from Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M). Carlos Sunyer is PhD Candidate at the University Carlos III of Madrid.

Abstract: 

The shortage of healthcare workers is currently affecting most of the developed world. However, the numbers are strikingly higher in the European context. According to a report from the World Health Organization published in 2022, the shortage of healthcare workers is estimated to reach 1.8 million professionals in Europe. Among all medical workers, nurses and GP’s stand at the top of the list of missing professionals for various reasons that range from lower wages to perceptions of smaller value added/quality of the type of job developed. In this paper, we focus on a policy initiative introduced in a Spanish region, Catalonia, that substantially raised the wage of medical students choosing the GP specialty as their future medical career. We use administrative data on the universe of last year medical students career choices and their grades, and compare those choosing to become GP’s in Catalonia vis-a-vis the rest of Spain, before and after the introduction of the policy. We also analyze the existence of heterogeneity in the response of the different candidate profiles.