The Impact of Home Pregnancy Testing on Fertility and Women's Later-Life Outcomes

Job Market Paper  [PDF]

Home pregnancy tests give early fertility information and help women make timely family-planning decisions. This paper studies how the introduction of home pregnancy tests in the US in 1977 impacted fertility, early prenatal care, and later-life outcomes. Using county-level drugstore accessibility to approximate test availability, I document significant trend breaks in fertility rates after 1977 among women who had access to drugstores. The effects are the strongest for those aged 15–29 and concentrated among those with access to abortion services. In the long run, women exposed to home pregnancy tests were more likely to delay childbirth, participate in the labor force, and never marry; these women were also less likely to divorce.

See You at Night: Unintended Consequences of Raising Physician Diagnostic Fees for Emergency Care

with Hsien-Ming Lien

Taiwan's universal healthcare system compensates physicians' expertise with diagnostic fees without regulating their pay. To understand its impacts on medical inputs and outcomes, we study a 2010 policy that increased nighttime ED diagnostic fees by 30%. Using a regression discontinuity and an event-study method, we find an 8 to 18 percentage point increase in nighttime admissions among the least urgent, suggesting hospitals strategically admit more nighttime nonurgent patients to increase profits. While hospitalization slightly increased, the policy did not affect capacity, treatment intensity, length of stay, hospitalization costs, or mortality. No substitution between emergency and primary care was observed, implying hospital-driven behaviors.