Overlapping Policy Interventions: Evidence from Home Health

Governments often concurrently deploy multiple policy instruments to tackle a common objective, yet researchers typically analyze each policy's impacts independently. We study interactions across policies and their implications within the context of efforts to reduce Medicare-financed home health services. We consider two geographically targeted policies: strike force prosecutions of suspected fraud and moratoria on the entry of new home health agencies. Depending on location and time, we observe either both, one, or neither policy in place. Individually, each policy reduced home health use substantially, and was well-targeted to places with higher treatment effects. Although we estimate only a modest interaction between the two policies, we find that optimally allocating them across the areas that received at least one policy could have increased their total impact by about 20% relative to the observed placement. Our exercise highlights the potential gains from coordination across different policy instruments pursuing similar objectives.