Liquidity constraints and inadequate precautionary savings create financial vulnerability for low-income households who face costly credit markets when unexpected expenses arise. This paper presents a laboratory experiment integrating a dynamic life-cycle savings model with prize-linked savings accounts (PLSAs, which offer lottery-style prizes in lieu of guaranteed interest) to investigate whether the behaviorally-motivated intervention can increase savings under financial uncertainty. I find that PLSAs crowd-out traditional savings accounts by 36.3 to 33.0 percent. Total savings do not increase. This portfolio reallocation imposes costs in the low prize treatment: participants earn 16.7 percent less than control, with the largest crowding-out effects concentrated among not risk averse individuals who exhibit 43.3 percent reductions in traditional savings. PLSAs function primarily as portfolio substitutes rather than savings-creation tools. Heterogeneity across risk preferences suggests that PLSAs should be marketed to unbanked households who are not risk averse.

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.

In 2024, Tennessee changed the generosity and duration of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits. For the last 20 years, UI-eligible individuals who were displaced from their jobs could receive up to 60 percent of their previous wages up to $275 per week for a maximum of 26 weeks. For claims filed after Dec 1, 2023, individuals could receive up to $325 per week, but the duration of those benefits was shortened to as low as 12 weeks depending on the state's unemployment rate. In this project, we will examine the effects of this reform on both the state as a whole and also at the individual claimant level.