Employment-Based Health Insurance and Aggregate Labor Supply

Zhigang Feng and Kai Zhao

No 2015-11, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the impact of the employment-based health insurance system on aggregate labor supply in a general equilibrium life cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic risks in both income and medical expenses. We find that employment-based health insurance provides Americans with an extra incentive to work and is an important reason why they work much more hours than Europeans. In contrast to Europeans, who get universal health insurance from the government, most working-age Americans get health insurance through their employers. Since medical expenses are large and volatile, and there is no good alternative available in the private market, health insurance from employers can be highly valuable to risk-averse individuals (much more than its actuarially fair cost), thus providing them with extra incentive to work. We calibrate the benchmark model to match the US system using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey dataset. The results of our quantitative experiments suggest that different health insurance systems account for more than half of the difference in aggregate hours that Americans and Europeans work. Furthermore, our model can also match several other relevant empirical observations, that is, the different employment rates and the different shares of full-time/part-time workers in the U.S. and Europe. When our model is extended to include the different tax rates in the U.S. and Europe, a main existing explanation for the difference in aggregate labor supply, the extended model can account for a major portion of the difference in aggregate hours that Americans and Europeans work.

Keywords: Labor Supply; Employment-Based Health Insurance; General Equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E20 E60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2015-11.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Employment-based health insurance and aggregate labor supply (2018)
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:uct:uconnp:2015-11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics University of Connecticut 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1063 Storrs, CT 06269-1063. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark McConnel ().