Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper examines the effect of nurse practitioners' (NPs') expanded authority on job postings, using a new publicly available administrative dataset on postings tagged with occupation codes. Using difference-in-differences and event study empirical designs to exploit changes in state level legislation related to NPs, I find that giving NPs signature authority, the ability to sign documents related to their usual work that previously required the signature of a physician, leads to a 1.5 percentage point increase in the fraction of healthcare postings for NPs. Giving NPs full practice authority, the ability to operate without physician oversight, has an insignificant and noisy effect on NPs' job postings. These results suggest that firms may respond to NPs' additional authority by hiring more NPs.