EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Has the Affordable Care Act increased part-time employment?

Aparna Mathur, Sita Slavov and Michael Strain

Applied Economics Letters, 2016, vol. 23, issue 3, 222-225

Abstract: We examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on part-time employment. Because the ACA's employer health insurance mandate applies to individuals who work 30 or more hours per week, employers may try to avoid the mandate by cutting workers' hours below the 30-hour threshold in order to avoid having to provide them with health insurance. Although the employer mandate only went into effect in 2015, many observers have argued that forward-looking employers began to shift towards a part-time workforce well in advance of the mandate. To test this hypothesis, we examine relative shifts across two categories of part-time workers (25-29 hours and 31-35 hours). We find some evidence of a shift from the 31-35-hour category into the 25-29-hour category after the passage of ACA in March 2010. However, that shift is not more pronounced among low-wage workers or among workers in industries and occupations most likely to be affected by the mandate. Thus, there is little evidence that the ACA has caused the shift across hours categories, or led to an increase in part-time employment. However, the ACA could cause a shift towards part-time work in the future as the mandate takes effect.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2015.1066483 (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:taf:apeclt:v:23:y:2016:i:3:p:222-225

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2015.1066483

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:23:y:2016:i:3:p:222-225