Download or read book Three Essays on the Labor Market Determinants of Access to Employee Benefits written by Leslie Hodges and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because employment is a central social policy goal, policy analysts and policy makers are interested in better understanding whether and how jobs meet people's needs. To contribute to research in this area, this dissertation uses nationally representative survey data and regression analysis to empirically examine how the characteristics of workers and their jobs affect access to employee benefits. The first two essays focus on access to the unemployment insurance program, and the third essay focuses on access to employer provided health insurance coverage, paid leave, and pensions. Together these chapters identify barriers and pathways between employment and benefits after the Great Recession and highlight ways in which policy makers can broaden the protective effects of employment in the new economy.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Labor Market Effects of Technological Change and Unemployment Benefits written by Franziska Brall and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Labor and Health Economics written by Dajung Jun and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonportable fringe benefits, such as health insurance and retirement benefits, can influence an individual's career decisions and financial well-being. To protect employee's utility, state and federal governments enacted policies that regulated these benefits. The first two chapters of my dissertation study two such policies: tax credits for private health insurance coverage and dependent coverage mandates that allowed young adults to be covered through their parents' insurance. I examine the effects of these policies on several health and labor market outcomes. In the last chapter, my coauthor and I explore a slightly different perspective on fringe benefits. We examine to what extent lifetime earnings could explain the variation in wealth at retirement. By researching these topics, I contribute to the understanding of how fringe benefits and lifetime earnings affected outcomes of rational decision-making: health insurance take-up, job mobility and wealth accumulation.In chapter 1, I investigate the effectiveness of tax credits on health insurance premiums. There was a renewed interest in using tax credits to increase health insurance coverage after the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Health Insurance Tax Credit (HITC) was implemented between 1991--1993 to reduce the burden of health insurance premiums primarily for low-income families. Although it was active for three years, this policy has been studied in only one previous study. In this chapter, I examine the effectiveness of the HITC by using the Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP), and I provide the first estimates of its effects on healthcare utilization and self‐reported health status. My results align with previous studies and suggest the HITC increased the health insurance take-up by 5.8 percentage points. The implementation of the HITC also significantly improved the self-reported health status of respondents.In the second chapter, I analyze the effects of dependent coverage mandates on working fathers' job mobility and compensation. Due to the low rates of health insurance coverage among young adults, some state governments began mandating health insurance companies to allow adult children to stay on their parents' health insurance plans. First implemented in 1995, these mandates aimed to increase health coverage among young adults. In 2010, the federal government enacted a more comprehensive version of the dependent coverage mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act. These state- and federal-level efforts successfully increased insurance rates for young adults, but they might have also come with unintended consequences for parents. Parents who placed a high value on health insurance for their young adult children might be reluctant to leave jobs with employer-provided health insurance, and employers might offset the mandated-incurred health care costs by reducing other types of employee benefits or earnings. To assess the extent of such consequences, I study the effects of both the state and federal dependent health insurance mandates on fathers. By analyzing the 2004 and 2008 SIPP panels, which are linked with Detailed Earnings Records and Business Registrar data from the United States Census, I examine the mandates' effects on fathers' voluntary job separation rates (job-lock and job-push) and changes in their compensation. After the implementation of the mandates, I observe a significant decrease in the likelihood of voluntary job separation among eligible working fathers aged 45--64 with employer-provided health insurance. Additionally for these fathers, except for those who separated from these jobs within the current wave, my analysis slightly evidences that the mandates reduced the total monetary compensation. In the last chapter, we investigate the impact of lifetime earnings on retirement wealth. Historically, many households accumulated substantial wealth by retirement, while many other households accumulated very little. Venti and Wise (1999, 2001) directly examine this question by utilizing data that was superior to that available to previous researchers and conclude that ``the bulk of the dispersion must be attributed to differences in the amount that households choose to save.'' In this paper, we examine the extent that a remaining problem in their data affected their results: Their measure of lifetime earnings, despite being based on administrative data, was subject to topcoding in each year. Using the 2001 SIPP that was not subject to the same problem, we find that the effect of the topcoding was substantial. At least 35 percent of individuals were misclassified in each of the top four deciles. When replicating a key result of Venti and Wise (2001), our findings suggest that the correlation between lifetime earnings and savings was about 50\\% greater than what was found when using censored deciles. This increased explanatory power came largely at the expense of the other variables in the regression model.

Download or read book Three Essays on Labor and Health Inequities by Race and Gender written by Bongsun Regina Seo and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the intersection of labor market and health inequities by race and gender in the United States in three chapters. In the first chapter, I use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to evaluate the impact of eldercare needs on potential caregivers' labor supply and health outcomes. Using an event-study specification, I find that eldercare needs lead to a persistent decline in labor supply and increase in depression levels among potential caregivers. I show that access to state-level paid leave may mitigate the effects of eldercare needs on one's labor supply and depression levels for spousal potential caregivers, but not for parental potential caregivers. In addition, I find suggestive evidence that access to paid leave may be especially beneficial for potential caregivers of color and those with less education. The second chapter proposes a theoretical framework to evaluate the interplay of gender norms, the gender wage gap, and the paid care market's specific characteristics. The study shows how declines in the gender wage gap may have small effects on the division of eldercare work in the presence of persistent gender norms. The study also suggests that market power dynamics, in conjunction with gender norms, might perpetuate reliance on the female provision of unpaid care. We draw out implications from the model that emphasizes the importance of policies that promote gender-egalitarian household division of labor and affordable access to quality long-term care. The third chapter explores the pathways of racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes in the United States, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. The study reveals that non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals are most likely to report poor health, and these disparities root from individual socioeconomic characteristics as well as environmental factors and access to healthcare. We find suggestive evidence that reducing levels of air pollution and land contamination in majority-Black neighborhoods and increasing access to quality hospitals and preventative services for both Black and Hispanic neighborhoods can help to reduce structural health disparities.In summary, the three essays of this dissertation highlight the complex and interconnected nature of labor market and health inequities by race and gender in the United States. The findings suggest that policies such as state-level paid family leave and reducing exposure to harmful environmental conditions could mitigate the effects of eldercare needs and racial disparities in health outcomes. Additionally, the study emphasizes the need for policies that promote gender equality in household division of labor and the paid care market.

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 Public Policy and Labor Economics written by Yun Zhou (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The majority of insured Americans obtain health insurance coverage through employment as a non-portable fringe benefit. The link between health insurance coverage and employment could have potential important implica- tions on workers’ labor market decisions. My dissertation consists of three chapters that contribute to the understanding of the interaction between health insurance and workers’ job mobility. My first chapter studies the effect of the state dependent coverage man- dates on the job mobility of young adults. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, many states had already implemented insurance mandates that extended the age that young adults could gain access to parental health insurance, an alternative insurance source which is not contingent on employment. If young workers with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) are locked into less preferred jobs for fear of losing health benefits, expanded dependent coverage is expected to reduce the job lock and increase mobility. Expanded eligibility could also decrease mobility among those who are pushed out of a better matched but uninsured job in search of access to ESI (job push). Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) 2000-2010 data, the impact of the state mandates on job mobility is identified by a triple-difference framework that exploits the state level dependent coverage variations in eligibility criteria, mandate implementation states, and mandate implementation time. Results show that expanded dependent coverage led to a 5% decrease in the mobility of workers with no ESI (job push). I find no evidence of reduced job lock. The second chapter of my dissertation extends the analysis of my first chapter to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Dependent Coverage Mandate. The ACA Dependent Coverage Mandate was passed on March 23rd, 2010, and became effective on September 23, 2010. The mandate requires that health insurance plans that provide dependent coverage must cover dependents until the age of 26. Using SIPP 2008-2013 data, and both difference-in-difference framework and regression discontinuity design, I find consistent evidence of reduced job push and no evidence of reduced job lock. The estimated reduced job push is larger than the state analysis. The third chapter studies the impact of the ACA Medicaid expansion on childless adults’ job mobility. The ACA Medicaid expansion raised the Medi- caid income eligibility threshold to 138% of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) for everyone including childless adults who were not the traditional beneficiaries of the Medicaid. 32 states adopted the expansion while 19 states opted out. The reform could potentially increase childless adults’ job mobility if they are “locked” in their jobs for fear of losing employer-sponsored health insurance. Using the 2011-2016 basic monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), this paper tests this hypothesis by comparing the job mobility of childless adults in expansion states to those residing in non-expansion states, before and after the expansion. Results show the existence of “job lock” effect: the ACA Medicaid expansion increased the childless adults’ job mobility by 7% - 9%, and the increase comes entirely from job-to-job transitions. I find no evidence of the “employment lock”: the availability of Medicaid did not cause childless adults to be more likely to become unemployed or leave the labor force.

Download or read book Essays on Determinants of Disparity in Education and Labor Market Outcomes written by Anjali Priya Verma and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the determinants of disparity in education and labor market outcomes. The first chapter, co-authored with Imelda, examines the impact of clean energy access on adult health and labor supply outcomes by exploiting a nationwide roll-out of clean cooking fuel program in Indonesia. This program led to a large-scale fuel switching, from kerosene, a dirty fuel, to liquid petroleum gas, a cleaner one. Using longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and exploiting the staggered structure of the program rollout, we find that access to clean cooking fuel led to a significant improvement in women’s health, particularly among those who spend most of their time indoors doing housework. We also find an increase in women’s work hours, suggesting that access to cleaner fuel can improve women’s health and plausibly their productivity, allowing them to supply more market labor. For men, we find an increase in the work hours and propensity to have an additional job, mainly in households where women accrued the largest health and labor benefits from the program. These results highlight the role of clean energy in reducing gender disparity in health and point to the existence of positive externalities from the improved health of women on other members of the household. The second paper studies the labor supply response of women to changes in expected alimony income. Using an alimony law change in the US that significantly reduced the post-divorce alimony support among women, I first show that this led to an increase in divorce probability. Second, consistent with the theoretical prediction from a simple model of labor supply, the reform led to an increase in the female labor force participation, with a larger increase among ever-married and more educated samples of women. As a result, the average female wage income increased after the reform. While labor supply increased, I show that most of this increase was concentrated in part-time employment, which may not be sufficient to compensate for the expected loss in alimony income. In light of the recent movement in the US to reform alimony laws, these findings are pertinent to understand its implications on women’s labor supply and economic well-being. The third chapter, co-authored with Akiva Yonah Meiselman, studies the long-run effects of disruptive peers in disciplinary schools on educational and labor market outcomes of students placed at these institutions. Students placed at disciplinary schools tend to have significantly worse future outcomes. We provide evidence that the composition of peers at these institutions plays an important role in explaining this link. We use rich administrative data of high school students in Texas which provides a detailed record of each student’s disciplinary placements, including their exact date of placement and assignment duration. This allows us to identify the relevant peers for each student based on their overlap at the institution. We leverage within school-year variation in peer composition at each institution to ask whether a student who overlaps with particularly disruptive peers has worse subsequent outcomes. We show that exposure to peers in highest quintile of disruptiveness relative to lowest quintile when placed at a disciplinary school increases students’ subsequent removals, reduces their educational attainment, and worsens labor market outcomes. Moreover, these effects are stronger when students have a similar peer group in terms of the reason for removal, or when the distribution of disruptiveness among peers is more concentrated than dispersed around the mean. Our findings draw attention to an unintended consequence of student removal to disciplinary schools, and highlights how brief exposures to disruptive peers can affect an individual’s long-run trajectories

Download or read book Three Essays on Teacher Labor Markets in Thailand written by Pumsaran Tongliemnak and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2010 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay of this dissertation examines the role of teacher characteristics in schools on student outcomes using datasets from TIMSS 1999 and TIMSS 2007 international tests. Taking an advantage that students have to take both mathematics and science subjects from different teachers, I use the method of First Difference (FD) analysis in order to remove the potential biases between teacher attributes and unobserved student characteristics. The findings show some contradictory outcomes between the FD analysis and ordinary least squares (OLS) analysis. The second essay looks into the problem of recruitment of well-qualified high school and college graduates to work as primary and secondary school teachers. I compare teacher salaries and benefits vis-à-vis other mathematics and science-oriented professions namely medical professions, engineers, accountants, scientists and nurses. In addition, I compare incomes between people who graduate from teacher colleges and non-teacher colleges. Using data from Thailand Labor Force Survey from 1985 to 2005, I find that teachers are the most poorly paid of all professions, including nurses. The difference in terms of an opportunity cost between male and female teachers is also striking. Among the graduates from teacher colleges, male graduates earn more than their peers if they chose other occupations whereas female graduates earn less if they make other choices. The third essay looks at the reasons teachers choose part-time jobs, the type of jobs they choose, and the amount of income they receive from these jobs, as well as factors influencing these decisions. I find that approximately 20-25% of Thai teachers participated in moonlighting activities. The majority of them have part-time jobs including tutoring, selling food and other products, and farming. Low salaries and high level of indebtedness are the most important factors associated with the increased likelihood of having a part-time job. However, economic status does not correlate significantly with their decision to tutor as their part-time job.

Download or read book Bridge Employment written by Carlos-María Alcover and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the long-term trend toward earlier retirement slowing, and the majority of older workers remaining in employment up to and beyond statutory retirement age, it is increasingly important that we understand how to react to these changes. Bridge employment patterns and activities have changed greatly over the past decade, yet there is little information about the benefits of the various different forms this can take, both for employees and employers. This comparative international collection provides the first comprehensive summary of the literature on bridge employment, bringing together experiences from Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan. It identifies the opportunities, barriers and gaps in knowledge and practice, whilst offering recommendations on how organisations and individuals can cope with future challenges in aging and work. Written by international experts in the field, each chapter also makes substantive and contextualized suggestions for public policy and organizational decision-makers, providing them with a roadmap to implement and integrate bridge employment into policies and practices designed to prolong working life - a priority for workers, organizations and societies in the coming decades. This unique research handbook will be useful to a wide range of readers with an interest in the new concept of bridge employment and the extension of working life, and of interest to researchers and practitioners in organizational behavior, labor market analysis, human resource management, career development/counselling, occupational health, social economy and public policy administration

Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Unfair Advantage written by World Bank and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets written by Tito Boeri and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most labor economics textbooks pay little attention to actual labor markets, taking as reference a perfectly competitive market in which losing a job is not a big deal. The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets is the only textbook to focus on imperfect labor markets and to provide a systematic framework for analyzing how labor market institutions operate. This expanded, updated, and thoroughly revised second edition includes a new chapter on labor-market discrimination; quantitative examples; data and programming files enabling users to replicate key results of the literature; exercises at the end of each chapter; and expanded technical appendixes. The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets examines the many institutions that affect the behavior of workers and employers in imperfect labor markets. These include minimum wages, employment protection legislation, unemployment benefits, active labor market policies, working-time regulations, family policies, equal opportunity legislation, collective bargaining, early retirement programs, education and migration policies, payroll taxes, and employment-conditional incentives. Written for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, the book carefully defines and measures these institutions to accurately characterize their effects, and discusses how these institutions are today being changed by political and economic forces. Expanded, thoroughly revised second edition New chapter on labor-market discrimination New quantitative examples New data sets enabling users to replicate key results of the literature New end-of-chapter exercises Expanded technical appendixes Unique focus on institutions in imperfect labor markets Integrated framework and systematic coverage Self-contained chapters on each of the most important labor-market institutions

Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

Download or read book Informality written by Guillermo Perry and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2007 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes informality in Latin America, exploring root causes and reasons for and implications of its growth. This book uses two distinct but complementary lenses. It concludes that reducing informality levels and overcoming the "culture of informality" will require actions to increase aggregate productivity in the economy.

Download or read book Pension Insurance Data Book written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Jobs and Effects of Migrant Workers in Italy written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: