Kaden Grace, Economics PhD Candidate

This paper studies the labor market effects of private liability enforcement using Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB-8, 2021) as a natural experiment. A private enforcement mechanism in this context allows any citizen to sue anyone who aids or abets a prohibited abortion for minimum damages of $10,000. This practice lowers the evidentiary burden and expands the pool of potentially liable individuals, which raises expected operating costs and could incentivize out-migration for a broad set of physicians compared to traditional state enforcement. We leverage variation across physician specialties, states, and time in a synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) design to compare reproductive health physicians to all other physicians in Texas against similarly regulated states before and after SB-8's signing. We find that reproductive health physicians did not leave Texas at differential rates following SB-8. We can rule out an effect larger than 989 physicians moving, a 4.1% change relative to the pre-period baseline. For reference, we can rule out effects as large as those found in most of the contemporary literature on physician migration responses to state-enforced abortion restrictions. We also examine posted salaries and numbers of job offers and find no evidence of increased turnover nor compensating wage differentials under the risk of private enforcement. Our results provide a contrast to prominent media narratives of a large OB/GYN exodus from Texas.