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 …
When designing rent control regulations, policy makers aim to create regulations that ensure affordable and stable housing for current tenants while minimizing exits from the rental market by landlords. Vacancy decontrol provisions that allow rent re- sets between tenants intend to strike a balance between a lower rent burden for current tenants and future potential profitability for landlords. However, such provisions also increase the incentive for landlords to evict tenants. Such evictions reduce both the anti-displacement and rent reduction effects of rent control. To study the effects of rent control on eviction behavior, we exploit variation across ZIP codes in policy exposure to the passage of the 1994 rent control referendum in San Francisco. We find that a ZIP code with the average level of treatment experiences an additional 34 eviction notices—an 83\% increase—and an additional 13 wrongful eviction claims—a 125\% increase. These effects were concentrated in low-income ZIP codes and were larger in years when average rent prices rose faster than the allowed rent increases for controlled units.
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.