Employer health benefit costs and demand for part-time labour

Abstract

The current healthcare policy debate in the USA has stressed the fact that a growing number of Americans are going without health insurance coverage. Much of this decline in coverage is due to rising costs affecting employer's provision of health insurance benefits to their employees. One potential avenue for this is through employers changing their employment mix and decreasing the number of employees eligible for such benefits in an effort to reduce costs. In this study we investigate the link between rising employer costs for health insurance benefits and the demand for part-time workers.

Acknowledgements

The research in this article was conducted while the authors were Special Sworn Status researchers of the US Census Bureau at the Chicago Census Research Data Center. Research results and conclusions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Census Bureau. The content of this article has been screened to ensure that no confidential data are revealed. This research was funded by the Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship Program through the University of Minnesota.

The authors thank participants and discussants at the Midwest Economics Association Annual Conference in Chicago, IL, March 2008, as well as those at the American Society of Health Economists (ASHE) conference on Equity and Efficiency in Health and Healthcare, which took place at Duke University, Durham, NC, June 2008.

Notes

¹We also considered other potential instruments but found corporate status to be the only admissible instrument in over-identifying restrictions tests.

²We also ran the model using the fractional-dependent variable GLM regression procedure outlined in Papke and Wooldridge (1996). The results were very similar, so we report only those based on the more standard instrumental variables procedure.