The Labor Supply Consequences of Employment-Limiting Social Insurance Benefits: New Tests for Income Effects

Henry Hyatt

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2011, vol. 11, issue 1, 31

Abstract: Studies of moral hazard in employment-limiting social insurance programs such as Unemployment Insurance or Workers Compensation have demonstrated that higher benefits discourage work, emphasizing the price distortion inherent in benefit provision. Utilizing administrative data linking Workers’ Compensation claim records to wage records from an Unemployment Insurance payroll tax database, I explore a different explanation and implement tests for “income effects” that exploit the fact that claimants no longer experience a distorted price of non-employment after an employment-limiting benefit ends. A pair of legislative changes to a Workers’ Compensation benefit rate show little or no evidence of income effects and moderate evidence of income effects, respectively.

Keywords: workers’ compensation; labor supply; social insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1682.2641 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:bejeap:v:11:y:2011:i:1:n:25

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.2202/1935-1682.2641

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().