The Affordable Care Act: A Hidden Jobs Killer?

Helene Jorgensen and Dean Baker

CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)

Abstract: Opponents of the ACA have labeled the health care bill a jobs killer. It seems implausible that the bill could be expected to have much impact on employment except among the relatively small number of firms that are near the 50-worker cutoff. However the bill does provide a clear incentive to reduce workers’ hours below 30 per week and many employers claim to be making such reductions in hours. This issue brief looks at data from the Current Population Survey and finds only a small number (0.6 percent of the workforce) of workers report working just below the 30-hour cutoff in the range of 26-29 hours per week. Furthermore, the number of workers who fall in this category was actually lower in 2013 than in 2012, the year before the sanctions would have applied.

Keywords: debt; deficit; fed; debt-to-GDP ratio; government bond; GDP growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H H3 I I1 I13 I18 J J3 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 4 pages
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/aca-job-killer-2013-07.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:epo:papers:2013-13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().