Download or read book Three Essays on Wage Inequality and Health Insurance Coverage written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Three Essays on Inequalities in Income and Health written by Jeff Larrimore and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation considers several aspects of the distribution of income and income inequality. It does so by improving estimates of inequality between demographic groups, analyzing factors contributing to US income inequality trends, and estimating the impact of income on health outcomes for individuals in the lower tail of the income distribution. Most empirical studies of earnings and income inequality across demographic groups are based on data from the public use March CPS. However, censoring of high incomes in this data prevent researchers from observing the full distribution. The first essay uses internal CPS data to illustrate how topcoding results in the understatement of income and earnings gaps between men and women, Blacks and Whites, and people with and without disabilities. It also demonstrates how a new series of mean incomes for topcoded observations can be used in conjunction with public use CPS data to closely approximate these internal results. The second essay considers the factors accounting for trends in household income inequality. Using a shift-share approach, this essay analyzes whether income inequality shifts are accounted for by male and female earnings distribution changes or by changing household characteristics. It illustrates that the factors contributing to the rapid rise in household income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s differ substantially from those contributing to slower increases in the 1990s. In contrast to findings for the 1970s and 1980s, in more recent years increases in male earnings inequality largely account for household income inequality trends while declines in the correlation of spouses' earnings have mitigated household income inequality growth. The final essay shifts from considering income inequality to the impact that income has on the health of low income individuals. Health economists have long observed a positive relationship between health and income but the reason for this relationship is unclear. Using exogenous variation in income from state-level differences in the Earned Income Tax Credit, it observes the impact on morbidity of an exogenous increase in income for low income individuals. The results find only weak evidence that the increases in income result in improvements in self-reported health status or the prevalence of functional limitations.

Download or read book Essays on Health Work Poverty and Income Inequality written by Elise Gould and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Economic Policy Income Inequality and Health Insurance written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on economic policy: Income inequality and health insurance.

Download or read book Essays on Economic Policy written by Eric Doviak and published by . This book was released on 2010 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 Essays in Labor and Health Economics written by Daniel Ethan Beemon and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the interaction between wages and other, non-wage incentives and outcomes in the labor market. In the first chapter, I develop and estimate a labor market search model with employer sponsored health insurance (ESHI), worker and firm heterogeneity, and wage dispersion arising from firm market power and job transition fric- tions. I estimate this model and use it to examine the impact of ESHI on the wage distribu- tion, and to counterfactually predict the effect of removing health insurance from the labor market via the provision of free public insurance. I consider two alternative policies where universal healthcare is funded external to the model, or via a new corporate tax on revenue. In the first, I find a considerable degree of passthrough to wages, roughly 76%, of what is effectively a subsidy to firms that were previously paying insurance premiums. However, it takes almost ten years for these wage gains to fully accrue to workers. In the second policy, average wages are virtually unaffected, but in addition to providing insurance coverage to all individuals, the tax acts as a transfer of wealth from the highest to the lowest earners, and these distributional effects are realized much more rapidly. In both counterfactual regimes, wage inequality decreases by a little more than 2 percentage points, but unemployment, job mobility, and joint productivity are not significantly impacted by universal healthcare. In the second chapter, I examine non-wage incentives more generally. This chapter develops a simple structural model of the choice to work a second job. I examine the effects of non-wage job characteristics on this decision making in order to determine the extent to which individuals hold multiple jobs as a source of enjoyment, versus as a means of overcoming hours constraints in the primary job. To fit this model, I estimate a distribution of enjoyment parameters for individuals holding more than one job, and find that on average, individuals dislike their secondary jobs about 13.5% more than their primary jobs, but roughly 35% of these individuals enjoy their secondary jobs. Though this supports findings of hours constraints as the primary motivator of dual job holding, these results provide a framework for further study of the substantial portion of dual job holders that do prefer their second jobs. The third chapter examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and its related income and employment shocks on the use of mental health resources in the Wisconsin Medicaid population. Using administrative Medicaid claims data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, I find a reduction in mental healthcare utilization during the public health emergency (PHE) that is similar to but significantly smaller than observed trends in overall outpatient visits. However, making use of the PHE declaration as an exogenous shock to employment, I find that this decline was 0.45 percentage points smaller for individuals who experienced a decrease in wages of 50% or more. This is largely driven by the subset of individuals with a pre-existing mental health diagnosis, as for this group I find the effect of an employment shock was a 1.3 percentage point smaller drop in mental health visit probability, a 4.35% difference relative to individuals who did not experience a reduction in wages. This suggests that individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions were more likely to continue care during the initial months of the pandemic if they were subjected to some form of job displacement.

Download or read book Essays on Labor and Health Economics written by Chen Zhao and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay looks how the disability wage gap as well as the gender, race, and ethnicity wage gaps are affected by macroeconomic conditions. Even though a large literature looks at the trends of these wage gaps, very little research considers their cyclicality. I use the SIPP linked to administrative earnings records to look at how these gaps vary with local labor market conditions from 1978 to 2010. For annual earnings, the disabled and blacks seem to fare better than their counterparts as labor market conditions worsen while women seem to fare worse than men, and the results are mixed for Hispanics. For hourly earnings, the results are largely mixed and inconclusive. There is also evidence that these results vary by decade. The second essay asks whether the gender gap in total compensation is smaller than the gender wage gap. One potential explanation for the observed gender wage gap is that men and women value the nonwage aspects of a job differently. I construct two individual level measures of total compensation - one using supplemental CPS data on employer contribution to health insurance premiums and one using the NLSY linked to employer cost data. I find that the observed gender gap resulting from these measures of total compensation is almost identical to the observed gender gap in wages. The third essay considers how parents allocate scarce resources among children with different levels of initial endowment. Parents that are interested in maximizing the return on their investment might reinforce initial conditions, but parents motivated by equity might compensate. I use the SIPP to directly measured health endowment as whether the child has any health conditions and parental investment as the frequency with which parents do various activities with each child. The results show that there is some evidence that parents do not invest equally in children of different health endowments, but the evidence is far from overwhelming. Moreover, the results differ depending on parents' education and the children's age group. In general, these results seem to indicate that pattern of parental behavior depends crucially on the specific investment.

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 Three Essays on Income and Wage Inequality written by Giammario Impullitti and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Manage the Margins written by Ling Zhu and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes three studies, devoted to trying to understand inequality in health between people from different social groups in a democratic society. In the U.S., social inequality in health takes various forms and the key to understanding how democracy solves the problem of inequality lies in a complex set of political and social factors. I take an institutional approach and focus on examining how political and policy institutions, their administrative processes, and the policy implementation environment are linked to social inequality in health. The first essay, Whose Baby Matters More, uses a theoretical framework for evaluating heterogeneous group responses to public health policies and depicts how racial disparities in health are rooted in group heterogeneity in policy responses. The second essay, Anxious Girls and Inactive Boys, focuses on how state-level policy interventions and social capital interactively affect gender differences in health. The third essay, Responsibility for Equity, explores the link between publicness of state healthcare systems and social equity in healthcare access. In the first essay, I focus on racial disparities in infant mortality rates and pool state-level data from 1990 to 2006. The empirical analysis suggests that enhancing the capacity of state healthcare systems is critical to improving population health. Blacks and whites, nevertheless, exhibit different responses to the same policy. Racial disparities could be reduced only when policy interventions generate more relative benefits for Blacks. In the second essay, I find that social capital conditions the effect of public health policies with regard to managing childhood obesity. There are gender differences, moreover, in health outcomes and behavioral responses to state and local-level obesity policies. In the third essay, I find that different institutional factors exhibit different impact on inequality in healthcare access. While public finance resources may reduce inequality in healthcare access, public ownership and the public healthcare workforce do not have significant association with inequality in healthcare access. State Medicaid eligibility rules exhibit moderate impact on inequality in healthcare access.

Download or read book Rising Wage Inequality Across Skill Levels written by William Francis Blankenau and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Employment and Economic Well being of Vulverable Populations written by Ludmila Rovba and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Inequalities written by Ameed Saabneh and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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.