The Impact of Massachusetts Health Insurance Reform on Labor Mobility

Norma Coe, Wenliang Hou, Alicia Munnell, Patrick J. Purcell and Matthew Rutledge

Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of the Massachusetts Health Insurance reform of 2016 on job mobility and employment exit using administrative data from the Social Security Administration. The Massachusetts reform mandated that every resident have insurance coverage and facilitated this initiative by requiring employers to offer coverage, as well as expanding Medicaid and creating health insurance exchanges with subsidized premiums. These elements provided the basis for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed nationwide in 2010, so the experience of workers in Massachusetts provides evidence for how the ACA may affect labor market efficiency. Of particular interest is the extent to which Massachusetts’ reform reduced “job lock” – the phenomenon in which workers stay with employers to maintain their health insurance coverage, rather than move to a more productive match at another employer (especially a small firm unlikely to offer coverage) or exit employment entirely. The project measures differential effects by age, gender, and firm size, and tries to disentangle the effects of the employer mandate and the individual mandate by identifying individuals who cross state lines between home and work.

Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/the-impact-of-mas ... m-on-labor-mobility/ R

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:crr:crrwps:wp2016-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Grzybowski () and Christopher F Baum ().