Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Healthcare Use: Evidence from Sweden

Miika Päällysaho

No 26059, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: Unemployment can worsen health and increase healthcare use, creating fiscal externalities in publicly financed systems. Using Swedish register data on inpatient and outpatient care visits and drug purchases, measured as total costs rather than out-of-pocket payments, this paper estimates the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) generosity on healthcare use. Exploiting benefit caps in a regression kink design, I find no evidence that more generous UI affects healthcare use. Estimates rule out cost effects greater than 0.08 SEK per 1 SEK increase in benefits during the first 40 weeks after spell start. In Sweden's generous welfare state, modest benefit increases do not meaningfully alter the public healthcare costs of unemployment.

Keywords: administrative data; healthcare; regression kink design; social insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I18 I38 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/26059.pdf (application/pdf)

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:crm:wpaper:26059

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().