Kaden Grace, Economics PhD Candidate

This paper studies the labor market effects of civil liability enforcement using Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB-8, 2021) as a natural experiment. A civil liability 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 "bounty law" 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 criminal enforcement. We exploit variation across physician specialties, states, and time in a triple-difference design, comparing reproductive health physicians to all other physicians in Texas against similarly abortion-hostile states before and after SB-8's signing. Using a Medicare administrative provider panel of approximately 1.4 million physicians (2007--2022) and Wagescape job posting data (2016--2022), we find that reproductive health physicians did not leave Texas at differential rates following SB-8. The null result is consistent with the high fixed cost of interstate relocation, estimated at $150,000 to $250,000. Neither posted salaries nor job posting volume for reproductive health providers changed differentially. Our findings are corroborated by synthetic difference-in-differences and synthetic control estimators and provide a contrast to prominent media narratives of a large OB/GYN exodus from Texas. We contribute to a rapidly emerging literature by providing evidence that civil liability enforcement had no detectable effect on the Texas physician labor market above and beyond the broader abortion policy environment.