The Impact of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance on Labor Market Outcomes

Abstract

The US does not have universal healthcare coverage for all its citizens. Instead, institutions have been cobbled together, with coverage varying from person to person. Some forms of health insurance are part of the compensation for employment, while others can be accessed whether the person is employed or not. Employers and the government provide most people their health insurance. The Affordable Care Act has mandated all employers with at least 50 full time employees to cover the health insurance of at least 95 percent of the employees. This coverage is borne as a cost by the employer. My thesis uses longitudinal data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which includes individual-level responses to many demographic and socioeconomic questions) to estimate the impact of insurance cost by observing two sets of time periods (before the mandate is imposed and after the mandate is imposed) to study what has been the impact on variables such as wages, for people who are the heads of their households and what the variation is based on (such as race, age, level of education, and marital status).