Workforce Vaccine Mandates: The Effect on Vaccine Uptake and Healthcare Workers’ Labour Market Outcomes

Abstract

As part of its COVID-19 policy response, the New Zealand government implemented vaccination mandates as a condition of ongoing employment for certain workers. This paper examines the effect of these mandates on vaccination uptake among mandated healthcare, education and corrections workers and on healthcare workers’ labour market outcomes. This is enabled by New Zealand’s linked population-wide administrative data, which includes a comprehensive national COVID-19 vaccination register linked to tax records to identify employment outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that in the context of already-high vaccination rates, workforce vaccine mandates provided limited benefit in terms of increasing vaccination rates among mandated workers. Moreover, they negatively impacted healthcare workers’ labour market outcomes, which may have had wider consequences in terms of exacerbating existing health workforce skills shortages.