Residency decisions have large potential ramifications for the supply of health professionals in an area. This paper examines a policy change with the potential to impact the residency location decisions of obstetricians and gynecologists (OB-GYNs) — the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which revoked constitutional protections for the right to an abortion. We use a triple difference-in-differences design to examine whether these ”trigger bans” enacted in the wake of Dobbs affect residency applications to OB-GYN programs in those states. We find that in the years following the Dobbs decisions, applications to residency programs in ban states decrease by 12%.

Through an RCT at a large research university, I find that providing undergraduate students in an introductory Economics course with information about potential careers, income, research topics, and diversity in the field of Economics increases the likelihood of enrolling in a subsequent Economics course for underrepresented minority students by around 9.9 percentage points and that the information induces primarily lower-performing students to enroll.