Labor Market Responses to Rising Health Insurance Costs
| Title: | Labor Market Responses to Rising Health Insurance Costs |
| Author: |
Madrian, Brigitte; Cutler, David
Note: Order does not necessarily reflect citation order of authors. |
| Citation: | Cutler, D. and Brigitte Madrian. 1998. Labor market responses to rising health insurance costs. Rand Journal of Economics 29, no. 3: 509-530. |
| Access Status: | At the direction of the depositing author this work is not currently accessible through DASH. |
| Full Text & Related Files: |
cutler_labormarket.pdf (7.193Mb; PDF) 
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| Abstract: | Increases in the cost of providing health insurance must have some effect on labor markets, either in lower wages, changes in the composition of employment, or both. Despite a presumption that most of this effect will be in the form of lower wages, we document in this paper a significant effect on work hours as well. Using data from the CPS and the SIPP, we show that rising health insurance costs over the 1980s increased the hours worked of those with health insurance by up to 3 percent. We argue that this occurs because health insurance is a fixed cost, and as it becomes more expensive to provide, firms face an incentive to substitute hours per worker for the number of workers employed. |
| Published Version: | http://www.jstor.org/stable/2556102 |
| Other Sources: | http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3157 |
| Citable link to this page: | http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:2643643 |
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Peer reviewed scholarly articles from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University
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