Certificate of Need and the labor market

Kihwan Bae and James Bailey

Southern Economic Journal, 2025, vol. 92, issue 1, 133-151

Abstract: Thirty‐five U.S. states currently have Certificate‐of‐Need (CON) laws, which require health care providers to prove their “economic necessity” to a state board before they can legally open or expand. While dozens of articles have evaluated the effect of CON on hospitals and consumers, no published article has evaluated its effect on health care workers. We argue that the sign of the effect of CON on both the wages and employment is theoretically ambiguous. We conduct an empirical analysis of CON laws using 1979–2019 data from the Current Population Survey. We find that CON does not significantly affect the employment or wages of health care workers.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12693

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:soecon:v:92:y:2025:i:1:p:133-151

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().