Public health insurance, individual health, and entry into self-employment

Frank Fossen and Johannes König

Small Business Economics, 2017, vol. 49, issue 3, No 8, 647-669

Abstract: Abstract We investigate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self-employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into self-employment. Health insurance systems that distinguish between the two sectors of employment create incentives or disincentives to start a business for different individuals. We estimate a discrete time hazard rate model of entry into self-employment based on representative household panel data for Germany, which include individual health information. The results indicate that an increase in the health insurance cost differential between self-employed workers and paid employees by €10 per month decreases the probability of entry into self-employment by 1.7% of the annual entry rate. This shows that entrepreneurship lock, which an emerging literature describes for the system of employer-provided health insurance in the USA, can also occur in a public health insurance system. Therefore, entrepreneurial activity should be taken into account when discussing potential health-care reforms.

Keywords: Health insurance; Health; Entrepreneurship lock; Self-employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I13 J2 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-017-9843-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:sbusec:v:49:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s11187-017-9843-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-017-9843-0

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().