RESEARCH

Product safety regulation has been a ubiquitous policy tool throughout history. Debates typically center around the trade-off between safeguarding consumers and stifling the development of new products. In this paper, I study how stricter safety standards influence the nature and speed of medical innovation by drawing evidence from the 1968 Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act. For the first time at the federal level, this Act mandated enforceable performance standards to control the radiation risk of electronic products. I find that in response to this act, firms developed new technologies reducing the risks of diagnostic X-ray medical equipment (an increase of 64.2% in patent count) as a key channel to lower compliance costs. I also document an increase of a similar magnitude for innovations representing new radiation-generating medical devices and show some suggestive evidence for the complementarity of risk mitigation and new technologies using radiation. I rule out several alternative explanations for these findings, including introducing the CT scan. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest substantial welfare gains as measured by health improvements and private market values due to these induced innovations.

In this paper, I investigate whether prior authorization requirements can influence the provision of behavioral healthcare services. By drawing on the staggered adoption of state laws restricting prior authorization for substance abuse treatments in commercial health plans, I find specialty care facilities are more likely to provide low-intensity (i.e., outpatient) services while decreasing the provision of high-intensity ones (i.e., intensive outpatient, partial hospital, inpatient). I provide supporting evidence for two plausible mechanisms. First, reducing administrative barriers expands facilities’ treatment capacity, allowing more timely access to early-stage interventions. Second, removing such burdens appears to shift provider behavior, including changes in prescribing practices. Overall, this paper highlights a novel and underappreciated source of cost associated with healthcare administrative processes: beyond direct bureaucratic costs, they can significantly constrain organizational capacity to deliver care.

During the 1960s and 1970s, states across the US repealed laws that imposed limits on how many hours women could work in certain industries. We find that the repeal of these laws led to similar labor market effects for both men and women. In particular, the average workweek increased in length, and fewer people left the previously affected industries. In addition, both hourly and annual earnings fell. The effects for women are consistent with a model in which male and female labor are complements in production, and removing a workweek limit expands the supply of female labor. To explain the effects for men, we find evidence that repealing the female-specific workweek limit expanded the labor supply of spouses who also worked in affected industries. It suggested the complementarity of labor supply within households. 

In this paper, I study the labor market effects of pre-hire, project-specific collective bargaining by exploiting the staggered adoption of state restrictions on project labor agreements (PLAs) in public construction programs. I find restricting PLAs significantly increases the incidence of working overtime among construction workers, while imposing little effect on earnings and employment. Such effects are concentrated among non-union workers (who could otherwise be covered by PLAs) and immigrants, suggesting that limiting pre-hire collective bargaining weakens workers' bargaining power. My findings highlight the importance of extending labor protections to the temporary and project-based workforce.

To what extent does fiscal resilience depend on sin tax instruments, and how do local governments adjust when such revenue streams are disrupted? This paper examines America's most significant historical substance control—the alcohol prohibition of the early twentieth century—to provide empirical evidence on these effects. Prior to federal prohibition in 1919, cities derived approximately 8% of tax revenue from liquor license fees and maintained fiscal independence from higher levels of government. Using a novel dataset and exploiting the staggered implementation of state and federal prohibition laws, I employ a differences-in-differences analysis to examine fiscal impacts. Results show that prohibition led to a 68.56% decrease in local business tax revenue. Local governments largely shifted from these business taxes to local property taxes, which increased by 6.2% following the prohibition. I also document a temporary, modest decline in total government debt, suggesting borrowing adjustments smoothed fiscal shocks. This study sheds new light on how substance control policies affect local fiscal capacity and suggests that the core of fiscal resilience is not merely about securing new revenue sources but also about ensuring diversified and structurally stable local tax systems. 

Health plans can set arbitrary medical necessity criteria to restrict care in utilization review, creating uncertainty in medical billing. This paper examines whether standardizing these criteria affects the provision of healthcare services. Exploiting the staggered enactment of state laws mandating uniform, evidence-based criteria for commercial insurance plans covering substance abuse treatment, I find this standardization significantly increases the likelihood that such specialty facilities offer outpatient services by 1.9%. It also expands the average inpatient care capacity, proxied by a 31.3% decline in the probability of having facility-induced medical delay. These laws are also associated with a reduction in mortality from substance use disorders by 0.752 deaths per 100,000 persons. I provide evidence that these improvements cannot be explained by changes in patient selection, provider-insurer contracting, or physicians' prescribing behaviors. These findings suggest that reducing billing-related uncertainties can incentivize providers to expand access to life-saving behavioral health services, offering new insights into the design of regulations to simplify administrative hassles in health insurance.  

Does tightening immigration policies distort servicei quality within immigrant-intensive industries? To answer this question, I assess the causal effects of \textit{Secure Communities}, a county-based immigration enforcement program, on the quality of home care. Using establishment-level data and exploiting the staggered phase-in of \textit{Secure Communities}, I find that this program led to a rise in unexpected hospital admissions among patients and a decline in the provision of preventive care for bed sores. I present supporting evidence for a key channel: the number of immigrant workers significantly declined within the industry, leading to a rise in labor cost faced by home health agencies. I also rule out other alternative mechanisms, including changes in the number of patients/visits, the profitability of operation, and further adjustment of input mix. 

This paper examines the labor market consequences of state preemption laws, which prohibit local governments from enacting regulations governing work schedules. Leveraging the staggered adoption of such laws across states, I find that it leads to a significant increase in the length of the workweek and a higher incidence of overtime work. Meanwhile, I document an increase in straight-time hourly wages (by 1.37%) and weekly earnings (by 1.88%), suggesting the compensating differentials associated with working longer hours. I present evidence that these effects concentrate in counties having a higher labor market concentration, suggesting that preemption, by reducing local regulatory uncertainty, intensifies the power imbalance between workers and employers. 

Can occupational licensing requirements influence consumer welfare? In this paper, I investigate the extent to which regulating veterinary care shaped a key dimension of agricultural development: livestock productivity. Exploiting the staggered adoption of state-level licensing laws for veterinary care in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, I document the fact that adopting the licensing law led to a significant increase in the density of draft animals (horses, mules, and cattle), proxied by the number of heads per acre. I provide some suggestive evidence for one potential mechanism: during the progressive era, veterinary care regulations mitigated the asymmetric information issue in service, thereby scaling up the demand for high-quality veterinary medicine. My findings emphasize the broader effects of labor market regulation on service quality and provide important implications for ongoing debates regarding the value of occupational licensing. 

The public debate over unemployment insurance (UI) centers on the trade-off between its consumption-smoothing benefits and moral hazard costs, leaving little discussion along many other crucial margins of social welfare. In this paper, I empirically assess whether UI generosity affects consumer welfare at nursing homes. Exploiting the U.S. by-state-year variation in UI benefits, I find a 10% increase in the annual maximum UI generosity is associated with a lower prevalence of urinary tract infections (by 5.6%), as well as a decline in the percentage of residents with pressure ulcer (by 10%, or 0.11 percentage points) among private nursing homes. One underlying mechanism is that by reducing compensating wage differentials for ex-ante unemployment risks, UI benefits serve as a subsidy that enables firms to adjust the input mix (e.g., increasing infection control, personnel-based care, etc.). Meanwhile, although I document that higher UI benefits increase the staffing level of high-wage, high-skilled nurses (by 0.2%),  there are no significant changes in the quality provided by these workers. This additional evidence suggests a decline in workers’ quality-adjusted productivity, aligning with the idea that higher UI benefits can trigger moral hazard in the workplace. Taken together, this paper can shed new insights into the design of optimal UI: Among many costs and benefits, the social benefit derived from preventing patient hazards and infections should be weighed. 

Since the early 2000s, eighteen states in the U.S. have passed laws or set regulations to restrict healthcare facilities from mandating nurses to work beyond their contracted shifts. This paper explores how it affects earnings, employment, and hours of work among registered nurses (RNs), as well as the gender-specific implications. Exploiting the staggered adoption of state laws over time, I find putting such a law in effect can significantly reduce weekly working hours by 1.9 percentage points and lead to a $3.9\%$ decline in the prevalence of mandatory overtime. Preliminary findings are consistent with a simple theoretical model, suggesting that a restriction on mandatory overtime can efficiently diminish uncertainties in working schedules. In the meantime, the asymmetric impacts by gender highlights the value of workplace flexibility for female workers.