Download or read book Essays on Labour Markets in the Health Care Sector written by Tor Helge Holmås and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Health and Labor Economics written by Ana Ines Rocca and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, health insurance is often necessary for access to regular, affordable health care. With only eight of every hundred Americans buying private insurance plans on the individual market, the main sources for health insurance traditionally have been employers and the government. As new laws are being debated and introduced to reform an expensive health care industry in which nearly one-sixth of the population is uninsured, research is needed in order to evaluate the costs and benefits of these policy changes and to predict their success. To this end, in addition to understanding how likely individuals are to adopt new health insurance policies, we also should be interested in knowing how the demand for health insurance and changes in its accessibility will affect non-medical decisions. Specifically, labor market choices have been theorized to be directly related to decisions involving insurance coverage. If the availability of health insurance distorts a workers' job-related decisions, then the changing the landscape for how to access insurance may reverberate in employment outcomes. My dissertation focuses on understanding the factors that influence the demand for health insurance and the role that health insurance plays in an individual's decision to work, where to work, and how much to work. Specifically, I focus on the following three related questions: how does the demand for insurance affect labor market decisions such as when to exit unemployment? what drives insurance demand, and in particular, what motivators work best to increase demand for health coverage among the uninsured? and lastly, what are the supply-side employment responses to the provision of free or reduced-cost public health insurance? My first chapter explores how the demand for health insurance can change re-employment decisions among the unemployed, as well as the speed at which individuals return to work. Past research on this issue focuses on job-to-job switches and "job lock" but has yet to focus on individuals looking for work. This chapter uses data on laid-off individuals from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to compare the job search behavior and outcomes of individuals who differ in their demand for health insurance. I use three proxies for demand, based on spousal health and past insurance offer take-up decisions. Although each is potentially confounded by unobserved determinants of job search, I use a difference-in-differences and propensity score designs to isolate plausibly causal effects. I find consistent patterns across all three proxies (despite different potential omitted variables biases). Overall unemployment durations do not vary with demand for insurance, but this masks variation in the types of jobs taken. Individuals with higher demand for insurance have higher hazards for exiting unemployment into a job with insurance, but lower hazards for exiting to a job without insurance. This points to effects of insurance demand on both search effort and reservation wages, and to potentially important distorting effects of employer-linked health insurance. Whereas the first chapter takes variation in demand for insurance as a given, my second chapter digs deeper into the basis for this variation and whether it can be affected. In this chapter, I investigate the reasons the uninsured choose to forego insurance coverage and the impact of different messages on their insurance demand. Working with Enroll America, a large non-profit dedicated to decreasing the number of uninsured Americans, I conducted a stratified experiment to determine the best communication strategies to encourage participation in the healthcare exchanges. We test a combination of the following behavioral and information treatments: a risk treatment that emphasizes the average financial risk for someone without health insurance; a norms treatment that alerts our participants that staying uninsured will be against the law; a savings treatment that highlights the average savings available at the exchanges; a wording treatment where we refer to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as "Obamacare"; and lastly, a cost-calculator treatment that allows individuals to explore the likely cost of insurance based on their own characteristics. Among the uninsured, we find that the cost-calculator treatment, the risk treatment, and the mandate are most effective in increasing intention to purchase insurance. The cost-calculator and the risk treatment increase informedness among this population, but the cost-calculator (when paired with the savings treatment) is the only treatment that increases willingness to pay for insurance. We use the information on willingness to pay to construct sub-group price elasticities of demand to compare to previous work interested in the demand for health insurance. Overall, the results of this chapter highlight the importance of informational campaigns to increase awareness of the costs and benefits of health coverage, particularly after large changes such as those implemented by the ACA. My third chapter continues by looking at the changes that have been introduced as a result of the ACA. Specifically, it explores whether expanding access to government-provided insurance affects individuals' decisions regarding employment and overall hours of work. Recent findings have suggested that increasing access to health insurance outside of employment has a sizable, negative impact on labor force participation. Along these lines, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the expansion of Medicaid and private health insurance will cause a 1.5 to 2% reduction in hours worked in the first ten years. Comparing states by whether they chose to expand Medicaid under reforms introduced by the ACA, I look at changes in the probability a childless adult receives Medicaid, as well as changes in this group's employment likelihood and hours of work. Using household survey data from the CPS monthly survey and ASEC Supplement, I confirm a marked increase in the percent of childless adults insured by Medicaid but find no statistically significant changes in employment outcomes. I compare these results to other estimates of "employment lock" in recent literature. These results, though imprecise, align with the findings in Chapter 1 which suggest that overall employment is not drastically affected by insurance demand.

Download or read book Essays on Labour Markets written by Sebastian Buhai and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Health and Labor Markets written by Matthew Mark Knepper and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation looks at the interaction of the legal environment with health and labor market outcomes in a variety of settings. The first chapter examines the effect of state public health insurance expansion decisions on private insurance costs by comparing how private insurance plan costs have evolved over time according to whether a state has pursued a Medicaid coverage expansion as part of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. The second chapter explores how one can test for judicial ingroup biases and applies the test to workplace sex discrimination cases. The third chapter evaluates the potential efficacy of federal incentive payments designed to boost physician access to electronic health records on patient outcomes in an Emergency Department setting.

Download or read book Three Essays on Health and Labour Economics written by Mina Alizadehsadrdaneshpour and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines a dynamic effect of diabetes on employment. The second essay uses a broader measure of health and investigates its interaction with employment. The third essay explores a dynamic effect of education on hourly wage. The first essay investigates the diabetes effect on employment in Canada. The data is taken from the National Population Health Survey and men and women between age 25 and 64 are analysed separately. In contrast to the previous static studies on the effect of diabetes on labour market outcomes, this essay uses a dynamic model to identify the impacts of diabetes on employment in Canada. Results show that diabetes has a positive but insignificant effect on employment for men. The effect of diabetes on employment for women is negative and significant. The results confirm the signs and significance of diabetes coefficients estimated by static studies; however, the numbers are much smaller. Particularly, precise estimates of diabetes effect on employment would be helpful for policy makers to know the economic burden and design the appropriate policies. The second essay uses a broader measure of health to explore the relationship with employment. In contrast to previous static Canadian studies on the impact of health on labour market outcomes, this essay estimates a dynamic model using simultaneous equations to obtain more precise model specification for the interaction of health and labour market outcome. Results show that there is a high state dependency in employment and health for both men and women. Moreover, there is a highly significant and positive effect of health on employment for both men and women. As a result, health policies that have positive and direct effects on health can have positive and indirect effects on employment. The third essay investigates the return to education using a dynamic approach in Canada. This essay uses the longitudinal Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics and estimates the dynamic model for men and women between the age of 25 and 64 separately. In contrast to the previous static Canadian studies on the return to education, this essay estimates a dynamic Mincer model through a system GMM method to obtain more precise model specification for the return to education. Results demonstrate that the hourly wage is highly persistent for both men and women between age 25 and 64. The results also show that the return to schooling is increasing at the beginning of the working life for both men and women compared to a constant return to schooling by static Mincer function. Identifying the return to education can be useful for policy makers to decide on education expenditures and finance schooling programs.

Download or read book Three Essays on Health and Labor Markets written by Shanshan Liu and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third part is the combination of labor and health economics, which is concerned with the question how economic recessions affect the aggregate health outcomes of a population living in the same community. This chapter uses all inpatient data in Pennsylvania for the 2000-2011 period, during which people experienced two recessions, uses county unemployment rates as the primary indicator of recessions, and analyzes the effects of recessions on the percentage of total population in a community that are hospitalized for certain stress-related diseases, while controlling for the community's socio-demographic characteristics. This chapter finds that recessions significantly increase the risk of hospitalization due to alcohol-related conditions among all communities, but decrease the hospitalization rates for AMI and stroke among the high-population-density and high-poverty communities, respectively. Finally, there is no evidence showing any persistent effects of recessions on health.

Download or read book Health and Labor Markets written by Solomon W. Polachek and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the relationship between a nation's health policies, employee health, and the resulting labor market outcomes. Containing nine original and innovative articles, it is a fundamental text for anyone interested in labor economics.

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Insurance Regulation and the Labor Market written by James Bailey and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work. Chapter 1 examines the effect of state-level health insurance mandates, which are regulations intended to expand access to health insurance. It finds that these regulations have the unintended consequence of increasing insurance premiums, and that these regulations have been responsible for 9-23% of premium increases since 1996. The main contribution of the chapter is that its results are more general than previous work, since it considers many more years of data, and it studies the employer-based plans that cover most Americans rather than the much less common individual plans. Whereas Chapter 1 estimates the effect of the average mandate on premiums, Chapter 2 focuses on a specific mandate, one that requires insurers to cover prostate cancer screenings. The focus on a single mandate allows a broader and more careful analysis that demonstrates how health policies spill over to affect the labor market. I find that the mandate has a significant negative effect on the labor market outcomes of the very group it was intended to help. The mandate expands the treatments health insurance covers for men over age 50, but by doing so it makes them more expensive to insure and employ. Employers respond to this added expense by lowering wages and hiring fewer men over age 50. According to the theoretical model put forward in the chapter, this suggests the mandate reduces total welfare. Chapter 3 shows that the employer-based health insurance system has deterred entrepreneurship. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate, which de-linked insurance from employment for many 19-25 year olds. Difference-in-difference estimates show that the mandate increased self-employment among the treated group by 13-24%. Instrumental variables estimates show that those who actually received parental health insurance as a result of the mandate were drastically more likely to start their own business. This suggest that concerns over health insurance are a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States.

Download or read book Essays in Health and Labor Economics written by Matthew James Butler and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines how occupational injuries vary with the business cycle, the relationship between healthcare staffing levels and patient outcomes, and whether workers are compensated for changes in occupational risk. In the first chapter I examine how fatal and non-fatal occupational injury rates vary over the business cycle. Past research on the relationship between workplace safety and the business cycle has found only non-fatal accidents to be pro-cyclical. The failure of previous research to convincingly identify a pro-cyclical fatality relationship has led researchers to focus on a claims reporting moral hazard explanation of the pro-cyclicality of non-fatal injuries. Using state and firm level workplace safety data and local area unemployment rates, I find that workplace safety is pro-cyclical in both fatal and non-fatal injury rates, contrary to previous research. The occupational fatality rate elasticity ( -0.15) is larger in magnitude than its non-fatality counterpart ( -0.10). The next chapter explores how a change in nurse staffing levels for intensive care patients improved patient outcomes in Arizona. Using data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project's (HCUP) State Inpatient Databases (SID) for Arizona, I evaluate the impact of Arizona's October 1, 2002 mandate that no more than three intensive care patients be assigned to one nurse on nurse-sensitive patient health outcomes: mortality, length of stay, pressure ulcers, hospital-acquired pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and sepsis. I contribute to the literature regarding nurse staffing levels' impact on patient outcomes in the following ways: 1) the exploitation of the exogenous variation imposed by Arizona's regulation provides credible causal estimates of the impact of increased (marginal) nurse staffing levels on patient outcomes--mitigating the potential impact of omitted variables bias inherent in cross-sectional analysis, 2) it provides a sample size large enough to observe changes in low probability events such as hospital mortality, and 3) this is the first analysis of Arizona's intensive care services regulation. A difference-in-differences empirical analysis between intensive and non-intensive care patients finds no evidence that intensive care patient outcomes improved after the regulation was imposed. In the final chapter I examine the compensating wage differential for occupational risk in the mining industry. I create a balanced panel of county-year mining labor market observations (including occupational injury rates) from Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) and Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) administrative data. The MSHA's mandate to inspect mining operations at least twice a year provides an objective measure of occupational risk through citations and their associated monetary penalties. I estimate the reduced form impact of changing occupational risk on hourly real wages. Employing fixed effect models to mitigate the impact of omitted variables bias, I find that increases in once-lagged citations increase current wages, providing evidence of compensating wages in the mining industry for increases in occupational risk. I estimate a $106,528 compensating wage differential for a non-fatal occupational injury using instrumental variable analysis.

Download or read book Health labour market analysis guidebook written by and published by World Health Organization. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Health and Labour Economics written by Xavier Bartoll and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The main objective of the thesis, organised along four different research chapters, is to analyse how labour market conditions are associated with different health outcomes and how the economic crisis has affected this relationship.A first aim of the thesis is to analyse the job quality and health status of temporary employment versus permanent before and during the economic crisis in Spain. Previous research has identified that temporary workers tent to be engaged in low quality jobs and experience higher job insecurity. Moreover, during the economic crisis, temporary workers who "survive" mass layoffs may experience diminishing well-being due to the threat of the loss of employment. However, there is also evidence of an "other's unemployment" effect, i.e., increases in unemployment is positively associated with job satisfaction for survivors. Using data for Spain, the second chapter of the thesis shows that the quality of work for women with temporary employment worsens during the economic crisis but not for men. In addition to that, the job quality dimensions become differently valued during the economic crisis. It is known that temporary employment is related to work stress and poorer mental health, but in a widely heterogeneous way. For instance, temporary employment experiences greater job insecurity but in combination with less firm involvement and lower job demands could end with lower net job strain. In chapter three it is shown that in pre-crisis period to have temporary contracts impose a psychosocial burden for men compared to permanent, especially on those with lower probabilities of reemployment, but without changes during the economic crisis, except an increase for older men and those with university degree. No changes are observed for women. The second aim of this thesis is to explore the interrelation between working hours, job satisfaction and its effect on health outcomes. Previous research reports an adverse health effect of long working hours on a variety of health outcomes. Yet, other recent reviews and meta-analysis found weak or inconsistent support for this association. It is alleged that longitudinal studies are rarely used together with the potential omission of some key variables as working conditions among others. In fact, high job control or rewarding jobs can compensate for greater intensification and effort and even increase the supply of working hours. Therefore, the potential adverse effect of working hours on health can be confounded or moderated by job satisfaction. Using longitudinal data for Catalonia, the fourth chapter confirms that job satisfaction moderately confounds and modifies the effect of working hours on health status for men but to a lesser degree for women. Working long hours (41-47 h/w) predicts poorer self-perceived health. Moreover, the positive health effect of job satisfaction is reduced when working long hours. Unexpectedly, working very long hours (above 48 h/w) was protective for health among men. It is hypothesised that mismatches between actual and desired hours may help to explain this surprising result. A fact that is explored using cross-sectional European data. The fifth chapter shows associations between adverse mental distress and over- and underemployed rather than for unconstrained workers (included those working above 48 h/w). These findings give support to labour policies aimed at promoting flexibility on the employee side. A consistent finding along the different chapters of the thesis is that precariousness, job quality, and hours of work are relevant for well-being in terms of health outcomes, and the results are nuanced according to the voluntary nature and degree of worker control of working conditions." -- TDX.

Download or read book Empirical Essays on the Evaluation of Labour Market Health Programs written by Morten Saaby Pedersen and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Medical Work in America written by Eliot Freidson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Present-day health care policies in the United States are moving toward a system in which patients will be treated like industrial objects by doctors forced to work mechanically, says the distinguished medical sociologist Eliot Freidson in Medical Work in America. He offers a number of controversial proposals designed both to reduce costs and to avoid such dehumanization. In a series of essays that includes some of his classic work as well as significant new material, Freidson discusses the doctor-patient relationship, relations between physicians in various forms of medical practice, and the forces now reorganizing medical work. He shows how increasingly restrictive health insurance contracts insert a new, problematic element into both doctor-patient and colleague relations, and how bureaucratic methods of controlling medical decisions affect those relations. Finally, Freidson advances some basic principles to guide health care policy. He emphasizes that the physician's freedom to exercise discretion is essential if patients are to be treated as individuals rather than as administratively defined diagnostic categories. His recommendations include eliminating fee-for-service compensation, controlling health industry profits, and limiting the external administrative regulation of medical decisions while organizing medical work in such a way as to maximize effective and responsible self-governance.

Download or read book Labor Economics Problems in Analyzing Labor Markets written by William A. Darity, Jr. and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Darity, Jr. In 1984 the Kluwer series in Modern Economic Thought, under the editorial direction of Warren Samuels, brought out a book under my editorship entitled Labor Economics: Modern Views. It consisted of a series of essays and commentaries that sought, in a critical fashion, to assess the state of the art in the field of labor economics with respect to several themes. These included methodology versus practice, the analysis of discrimination by gender and race, the phenomenon of persistent racial differences in un employment exposure, occupational safety and health regulation, dual versus segmented labor markets, and the remnants of the Phillips curve trade-off between unemployment and inflation. Nearly a decade later I was approached by Warren Samuels and Kluwer about editing a new book that would again address where things stand in labor economics. In proceeding with the development of this current book I was a struck by the extent to which the research thrust that was apparent in the early 1980s remains intact as we move toward the 21st century. The vast majority of scholarship in the labor subfield is dominated by the methodological orientation of applied neoclassical microeconomics, supplemented by incursions from the themes that occupy the so-called "pure theorists," particularly of the game theoretic variety.

Download or read book Economics of the Labour Market written by P. N. (Raja) Junankar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global crisis has led to dramatic increases in unemployment rates over most of the countries of the OECD. This book provides alternative explanations of this phenomenon. Junankar begins with surveys of the labour market: labour demand, labour supply, and labour force participation. He argues that the growth of unemployment and long-term unemployment is mainly due to a lack of aggregated demand and not due to high unemployment benefits. Economics of the Labour Market shows that unemployment and long-term unemployment impose serious and significant costs on individuals, families, and society in general. Raja Junankar focuses on vital social issues arising from the malfunctioning of economies and this collection of essays tackles the real cost of unemployment.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intersection of health, inequality, and human capital is the source of some of the large and complex problems that continue to challenge our health care system and our health policy decision makers. My study touches on two areas at this nexus: socioeconomic determinants of health/development and economic costs (e.g., human capital, labor market) of chronic illness and disability. The first chapter examines the labor market outcomes of women co-residing with a disabled parent or parent-in-law. Because the vast majority of women providing this form of eldercare are still in their working years, informal care responsibilities may involve considerable opportunity costs. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I construct a longitudinal dataset documenting the labor market and co-residential eldercare experiences of sample women over 25 years. On average, I find that women co-residing with a disabled elder are less likely to engage in labor market work. However, responses vary over the life course. Co-residence prior to age 40 is associated with a 9 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of employment, an effect size twice that found for women over 50. The second chapter examines how poverty may affect brain structure and development. Little is known about how poverty is translated into deficits in cognition and achievement. Using a sample of children and adolescents (4 to 22 years) from the NIH Pediatric MRI Data Repository, we consider a potential neurobiological channel. We find that children from poor households display a maturational lag. Moreover, this atypical development is reflected in standardized assessments of academic ability and achievement. The third chapter examines the influence of sibling chronic illness or disability on children's early educational outcomes. Using a sample of sibling pairs from the PSID Child Development Supplement, we consider several categories of common childhood disabilities to explore whether and to what extent sibling health spillovers may vary according to the domain or severity of sibling impairment. We find evidence of substantial and heterogeneous effects of poor childhood health on well-sibling outcomes. Estimated spillovers in the case of developmental disabilities, in particular, are large and robust across a series of sensitivity analyses.

Download or read book The Influence of Inefficiencies in Health Care and the Labor Market written by Scott Barkowski and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first essay, ``Does Government Health Insurance Reduce Job Lock and Job Push?'', I estimate the extent that job mobility is affected by the link between health insurance and employment. Workers holding employment-contingent health insurance (ECHI) are often thought to stay in jobs that are otherwise inferior matches out of fear of losing their ECHI, while those without insurance may leave employment states that are otherwise good matches seeking access to ECHI. These two phenomena are known as job lock and job push, respectively. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Medicaid expansions resulted in many working class households gaining Medicaid eligibility for one or more family members, an alternative source of health insurance that is not contingent on employment. Using this eligibility as a measure of variation in the dependence on ECHI for health insurance coverage, I find large estimates of job lock and job push for men. Medicaid eligibility for one household member results in an increase in the likelihood of a voluntary job exit for men over a four-month period by approximately 34%. Similarly, moves into jobs with ECHI fall by approximately 25% in response to Medicaid eligibility. For women, I do not find evidence consistent with job lock. For the case of job push, some of my estimates suggest large effects, though these estimates have interpretive difficulties. The second essay, titled ``Does Regulation of Physicians Reduce Health Care Spending?'', examines the fear among physicians that legal liability increases health care spending. Theoretically, the effect of legal risk could be positive or negative on spending, and empirical evidence has supported both cases. Previous empirical work, however, has ignored that physicians face risk from centralized regulators -- industry oversight groups like medical boards -- in addition to civil litigation risk. This paper addresses this omission by incorporating previously unused data on punishments by oversight groups against physicians, known as adverse actions, along with malpractice payments data to study state-level health care spending. My analysis suggests that health care spending does not rise in response to higher levels of risk. An increase in adverse actions equal to 16, the mean year-to-year change within a state, is found to be associated with statistically significant average spending decreases of approximately 0.11% to 0.21%. Malpractice payments were generally estimated to have smaller, statistically insignificant effects. The final essay, ``Preliminary Results On The Effect of Specialist Cost Information on Primary Care Physician Referral Patterns'', reports early results on a field experiment designed to test whether primary care physicians (PCPs) would use information on specialist costs in allocating their patient referrals between doctors within the specialty. The experiment was performed in partnership with a private-sector group of medical practices organized as an Independent Practice Association (IPA). Randomly chosen PCP practices within the IPA were provided with a report listing average cost information for Ophthalmology practices within the IPA. The response of the PCPs is compared to a control group of PCP practices within the IPA to see if the information influenced which Ophthalmology practices received PCP referrals. Analysis of experimental data so far available does not find any effects that are statistically significant at conventional levels. These results, however, are based on data from a very short post-period, and are not considered final. The experiment is ongoing at the time of the writing of this essay.