Product Safety Standards and Technological Innovation:  Evidence from  the 1968 Radiation Control 
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How do product safety standards shape the pace and nature of innovation? The 1968 Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act, for the first time at the federal level, mandated performance standards to control the radiation risk of electronic products. I find that in response to this act, firms developed new technologies in order to lower compliance costs by reducing the risks of diagnostic X-ray medical equipment (a 49.6% increase in patent count). I also document an increase of a similar magnitude (by 54.3%) for innovations representing new radiation-generating medical devices, demonstrating the complementarity of risk mitigation and new radiation-based technologies. I rule out a number of alternative explanations for these findings, including the introduction of the CT scanner in 1972. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest substantial welfare gains as measured by health improvements and private market values due to these induced innovations.  

Selected for Presentation: 2023 NBER pre-Summer Institute Graduate Student Session (Development of the American Economy); the 93rd SEA annual conference)

Beyond Clock:  Labor Market Effects of Lifting  Gender-Specific Hours Restrictions 
(draft coming soon in October!)  with Price V. Fishback, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth

During the 1960s and 1970s, forty U.S. states dropped their maximum hours restrictions for female employees in the manufacturing and mercantile industries. We provide empirical evidence of its labor market effects by exploiting the phase-out of these state protective laws. We first show that dropping hours restrictions significantly increased both the probability of working over state-specific workweek limits (by 1.9 pp for the manufacturing industries and 1.4 pp for the mercantile industries) and the actual workweek (by 0.6% and 1.4% in the manufacturing and mercantile industries, respectively) among full-time female workers. We also find removing such limits dampened female employment in the manufacturing industries, demonstrating the substation between hours and workers. In terms of earnings, we document that without these hours limits in place, hourly earnings among young full-time female workers (25-35) significantly increased by 6.3%, resulting in a 6.9% decline in the pre-existing gender gap in pay. Among female workers (36-55) in the mercantile industries, hourly earnings declined by 6.7% but did not enlarge the gender pay gap. We provide suggestive evidence to rule out the possibility that changes in workers' composition drive our findings. Taken together, our empirical evidence highlights the initial gender-specific protective laws both limited women's autonomy in setting working schedules and imposed some statistical discrimination along gender lines. 

Administrative Simplification and Treatment Capacity: Evidence from Substance Abuse Treatment  
(draft and slides available upon request)

Excess administrative expenses put an enormous strain on the U.S. healthcare system, with cost-control processes playing a role in exacerbating this issue. However, little is known about how these administrative processes affect the provision of healthcare services. I empirically assess this question in this paper by drawing on state laws restricting prior authorization (PA) requirements for substance abuse treatments (SAT) in private health plans. Exploiting the staggered phase-in of state laws, I find that the likelihood of providing low-intensity SAT services increases while the propensity to provide high-intensity SAT services declines. In the meantime, tentative evidence suggests this redirection of healthcare provision is not driven by changes in the composition of patients, local market structure, over-utilization of SAT services, or increased contracts with private insurers. This paper quantifies the potential economic benefits of reduced medical delays and expanded treatment capacity when removing administrative processes. 

Selected for Presentation: the 2023 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Conference (poster session)

Do Unemployment Benefits Affect the Quality of Service? Evidence from Nursing Homes 

Abstract: 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, more generous UI benefits allow firms to reallocate resources and thereby increase the investment in risk mitigation (e.g., infection control practices). Meanwhile, I also document evidence that higher UI benefits increase the staffing level of high-wage, high-skilled nurses (by 0.2%). At the same time, they have no significant impacts on the quality of nursing care, suggesting a slight decrease in workers’ quality-adjusted productivity. Taken together, these findings 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. 

Mandatory Overtime and the Gender Gap in Pay: Evidence from Registered Nurses (draft available upon request)

Abstract: Does the presence of mandatory overtime exacerbate the persistent gender pay gap among mid-skilled workers? 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 assesses how it affects worker compensation for hospital-based registered nurses (RNs), paying particular attention to gender differentials. Taking advantage of the staggered roll-out of state laws over time, I find putting such a law in effect can significantly reduce weekly working hours by 0.287 on average and depress male hourly wages by 3.79\%. Preliminary findings are consistent with the theory of compensating differentials, suggesting that a legal restriction on mandatory overtime reduces the compensation premium associated with a disamenity in schedule arrangements. In turn, the introduction of these laws narrows the gender wage gap by 3.63% due to the mechanical asymmetry in mandatory overtime assignments between men and women within this occupation. Finally, there is some suggestive evidence that these legal approaches lead to an increase in the likelihood of entering the nursing profession.

​Will Our Trousers Fit After the Quarantine? Effects of COVID-19 Lockdowns and Digital Social Support on Personal Health Choices  (under review, with Tannista Banerjee and Arnab Nayak, draft available upon request)
The Impact of Deregulating Commercialization on Market Structure: Evidence from China's Medical Device Industry (with Tannista Banerjee and Ruchika Rungta, draft available upon request)