Jason Huh

We examine how physicians’ practice locations are affected by Medicaid expansions. We focus on the dramatic Medicaid eligibility expansions for pregnant women that took place between the early 1980s and the early 1990s. Following a recently‐developed estimation strategy, we identify the change in OB/GYN supply due to the expansions in an event‐study framework. We find that OB/GYN counts per capita grew post‐expansion and the increase persisted for years. Our results are mainly driven by early‐career OB/GYNs and concentrated in densely populated or poor counties. Our results show that Medicaid coverage rules could be an important determinant of physician location choice.

We use a difference‐in‐differences design to study the effect of opioid use on traffic fatalities. Following Alpert et al., we focus on the 1996 introduction and marketing of OxyContin, and we examine its long‐term impacts on traffic fatalities involving Schedule II drugs or heroin. Based on the national fatal vehicle crash database, we find that the states heavily targeted by the initial marketing of OxyContin (i.e., non‐triplicate states) experienced 2.4 times more traffic fatalities (1.6 additional deaths per million individuals) involving Schedule II drugs or heroin during 2011–2019, when overdose deaths from heroin and fentanyl became more prominent. We find no difference in traffic fatalities until after the mid‐2000s between states with and without a triplicate prescription program. The effect is mainly concentrated in fatal crashes with drug involvement of drivers ages between 25 and 44. Our results highlight additional long‐term detrimental consequences of the introduction and marketing of OxyContin.

We use a regression discontinuity design to study the effect of the COVID‐19 lockdown on traffic accidents. Based on administrative data from Louisiana, we find that the lockdown order led to a significant decrease in traffic accidents (−47%), including accidents involving injury (−46%) and ambulance (−41%). We also find evidence of heterogeneous changes in the decline of drivers involved in accidents, with a smaller decline among individuals aged 25 to 64, male, and nonwhite drivers.

We investigate the effect of teenage driving on mortality and risky behaviors in the United States using a regression discontinuity design. We estimate that total mortality rises by 5.84 deaths per 100,000 (15 percent) at the minimum legal driving age cutoff, driven by an increase in motor vehicle fatalities of 4.92 deaths per 100,000 (44 percent). We also find that poisoning deaths, which are caused primarily by drug overdoses, rise by 0.31 deaths per 100,000 (29 percent) at the cutoff and that this effect is concentrated among females. Our findings show that teenage driving contributes to sex differences in risky drug use behaviors.

Recent papers have documented positive externalities of Medicaid expansions on several non‐health related variables, such as crime, financial stress, child support, and child abuse. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between access to public health insurance and foster care admissions following state decisions to expand Medicaid coverage after the Affordable Care Act. Over 70% of all foster care admissions are related to child abuse incidents, which have been found to decrease following the Medicaid expansions. Our results suggest that the Medicaid expansions are associated with a large decrease in foster care admissions, driven by neglect incidents.