Contact Information
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 734-546-3074
nicoleholz2023@u.northwestern.edu
Education
Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, 2023 (expected)
MA Economics, Northwestern University, 2020
BS Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015
Fields
Primary: Health Economics, Public Economics
Secondary: Urban Economics, Applied Microeconomics
Curriculum Vitae
Job Market Paper
“Information Disclosure and Patient Demand” – Download (PDF)
Information disclosure programs can help consumers make better choices, but the consumers who respond the most to the information may not benefit the most or generate the most savings for firms designing the programs. I examine a disclosure program used by a private health insurer that highlights ratings of physicians based on two dimensions: quality and cost efficiency. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that the highest physician ranking of “Premium Care” leads to 38% more new patients (when compared to the lowest ranking) and that the effects are stronger for younger patients. These young patients, however, may not benefit by being matched to higher quality, more cost-efficient physicians. Using a two-way fixed effects research design studying patients who switch physicians following physician exit (from retiring or moving), I find that switching to higher quality, more cost-efficient physicians leads to larger declines in spending for middle-aged patients than for younger adult patients, with no evidence of adverse effects on patient health. Collectively, these results indicate that targeting disclosure programs to middle-aged patients can achieve greater cost savings than web-based ratings systems that disproportionately steer younger patients.
Other Research Papers
Rational Eviction: How Landlords Use Evictions in Response to Rent Control – Download (PDF)
with Eilidh Geddes
Rent control policies seek to ensure affordable and stable housing for current tenants; however, they also increase the incentive for landlords to evict tenants since rents re-set when tenants leave. We exploit variation across zip codes in policy exposure to the 1994 rent control referendum in San Francisco to study the effects of rent control on eviction behavior. We find that for every 1,000 newly rent controlled units in a zip code, there were 12.05 additional eviction notices filed in that zip code and an additional 4.6 wrongful eviction claims. These effects were concentrated in low income zip codes.
Housing Affordability and Domestic Violence: The Case of San Francisco’s Rent Control Policies – Download (PDF)
with Eilidh Geddes
Policy advocates claim that one benefit of rent control may be decreased intimate partner violence (IPV). However, the theoretical effects of rent control on IPV are ambiguous. Rent control may lessen financial stressors within a relationship and decrease strain that leads to violence. However, it may make leaving the relationship more costly, shifting the bargaining power in the relationship and leading to more violence. We leverage the 1994 expansion of rent control in San Francisco as a natural experiment to study this question. This expansion created variation across zip codes in the number of rental units that were newly rent controlled. We exploit this variation in a continuous difference-in-difference design. We estimate an elasticity of -0.08 between the number of newly rent controlled units and assaults on women resulting in hospitalization. This effect translates to a nearly 10\% decrease in assaults on women for the average zip code. This relationship is not explained by changes in neighborhood composition or overall crime, consistent with the effects being driven by individual level changes in IPV.
Who Profits from Amateurism? Rent-sharing in Modern College Sports – Download (PDF)
with Craig Garthwaite, Jordan Keener, Matthew Notowidigdo
Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by men’s football and men’s basketball programs. We characterize these economic rents using comprehensive revenue and expenses data for college athletic departments between 2006 and 2019, and we estimate rent-sharing elasticities to measure how rents flow to women’s sports and other men’s sports and lead to increased spending on facilities, coaches’ salaries, and other athletic department personnel. We rule out skill-upgrading of coaches as an alternative explanation of our results by focusing on head coach “stayers” using panel data on the identity of each football head coach in our sample. Using complete roster data for every student-athlete playing sports at these colleges in 2018, we find that the rent-sharing effectively transfers resources away from students who are more likely to be Black and more likely to come from poor neighborhoods towards students who are more likely to be White and come from higher-income neighborhoods. Having documented the existence of rent-sharing, we conclude with stylized calculations of a wage structure for college athletes using the collective bargaining agreements in professional sports leagues as a benchmark. We also discuss how our results help understand how universities have responded to recent threats to these rents arising from litigation, legislation, and the global coronavirus pandemic.
References
Prof. Matthew Notowidigdo (Committee Chair)
Prof. David Dranove
Prof. Dean Karlan
Prof. Molly Schnell