The tradeoff between knowledge of mandated benefits and moral hazard

Jessica H. Brown

Southern Economic Journal, 2022, vol. 88, issue 3, 1037-1064

Abstract: When workers are not aware of a mandated benefit, they cannot take it into account in their employment decision, leading to deadweight loss. On the other hand, lack of awareness of a benefit reduces moral hazard, decreasing deadweight loss. I incorporate these trade‐offs into a model of mandated benefits and apply the model to Temporary Disability Insurance, an employment benefit mandated in five states. First, using data collected through an original survey, I provide evidence that there is low awareness of this benefit. Second, I use the updated mandated benefits model to show that over a broad range of reasonable assumptions, the additional employee valuation of the benefit outweighs the additional program cost from moral hazard, and thus a public information campaign would increase employment.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12552

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:wly:soecon:v:88:y:2022:i:3:p:1037-1064

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().