We examine how health insurance expansions influence the entry and location decisions of health care providers. While it is generally expected that reductions in consumer prices following insurance expansions will prompt supply-side growth to meet increased demand (Arrow, 1963), we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that expansions of insurance with low, regulated provider reimbursements (e.g., Medicaid) can instead lead the supply side to contract. Additionally, we show that expansions of insurance with high, market-based prices (e.g., private coverage) can reduce acceptance of public coverage even as they drive growth in the overall concentration of providers.

Regulators often enact price restrictions with the goal of improving access to products at affordable prices. However, the design of these regulations may interact with firm entry and exit decisions in ways that mitigate the effects of pricing regulation or eliminate access to certain products entirely. In the US individual health insurance market, the Affordable Care Act established community rating areas made up of groups of counties in which insurers must offer plans at uniform prices, but insurers do not have to enter all counties in a rating area. They may partially enter a rating area by entering some counties but not others. Allowing partial entry creates trade-offs in rating area design. Larger areas may support more competition, but heterogeneous areas may promote partial entry as firms choose to not enter high cost areas. To evaluate these trade-offs, I develop a model of insurer entry and pricing decisions and investigate how insurers respond to rating area design. I find that banning partial entry increases entry overall, but at the cost of higher average prices since costs are higher in previously non-entered counties. On net, consumer welfare increases. Further, increasing the size of a rating area improves consumer welfare most when marginal costs are similar. Regulators must balance promoting competition with pooling high and low cost consumers in rating area design.

Policy advocates claim that one benefit of rent control may be decreased intimate partner violence (IPV). However, the theoretical effects of rent control on IPV are ambiguous. Rent control may lessen financial stressors within a relationship and decrease strain that leads to violence. However, it may make leaving the relationship more costly, shifting the bargaining power in the relationship and leading to more violence. We leverage the 1994 expansion of rent control in San Francisco as a natural experiment to study this question. This expansion created variation across zip codes in the number of rental units that were newly rent controlled. We exploit this variation in a continuous difference-in-difference design. We estimate an elasticity of -0.08 between the number of newly rent controlled units and assaults on women resulting in hospitalization. This effect translates to a nearly 10 percent decrease in assaults on women for the average zip code. This relationship is not explained by changes in neighborhood composition or overall crime, consistent with the effects being driven by individual level changes in IPV.