Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, state legislatures found ways to limit access to abortion, namely through Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers or TRAP laws, which sidestepped the federal protection of the right to an abortion by placing excessively burdensome requirements on abortion providers.This study will examine the impact of TRAP laws on women’s labor mobility using county-level abortion data, state-wide TRAP law data, and data on the employment and average salary of workers in the leisure and hospitality industry, spanning from 2001 to 2022. The study will employ Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) methodology (Dube et. al 2025) which utilizes a “clean control” to ensure appropriate control group assignment, mitigating the issue of negative weighting that arises from using earlier-treated panel members as controls for later-treated panel members. This methodology will ensure that differences among states in TRAP law enactment and abolishment are treated properly.
