We study how short-term labor markets responded to an extraordinary demand shock during the COVID-19 pandemic. We study traveling nurse jobs—a market hospitals use to fill temporary staffing needs—to examine workers’ willingness to move to places with larger demand shocks. We find a dramatic increase in market size during the pandemic, especially for those specialties central to COVID-19 care. The number of jobs increased far more than compensation, suggesting that nurses’ willingness to travel is very responsive to compensation. To examine workers’ willingness to move across different locations, we examine jobs in different locations on the same day, and find even more responsive labor supply. We show that part of this supply responsive-ness comes from workers’ willingness to travel longer distances for jobs when payment increases, suggesting that an integrated national market facilitates reallocating workers when demand surges. This implies that a simultaneous national demand spike might be harder for the market to accommodate rapidly.

More on this topic

BFI Working Paper·Apr 7, 2025

Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise

Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Ariel D. Zucker
Topics: Health care
BFI Working Paper·Mar 27, 2025

The Value of Medical Innovation in the Fight Against COVID-19 in the United States

Tomas Philipson, A. Mark Fendrick, Yier Ling, Eric Sun, and James Williams
Topics: Health care
BFI Working Paper·Mar 10, 2025

The Rise of Healthcare Jobs

Joshua Gottlieb, Neale Mahoney, Kevin Rinz, and Victoria Udalova
Topics: Employment & Wages, Health care