The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Labour Supply and Other Uses of Time

Anna Bottasso, Gianluca Cerruti, Maurizio Conti and Elena G. F. Stancanelli ()
Additional contact information
Gianluca Cerruti: University of Genoa
Elena G. F. Stancanelli: Paris School of Economics

No 15415, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A vast literature studies the behavioural impacts of health care reforms, often coming to controversial conclusions. Here we examine the time allocation effects of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obama Care, focusing on two ACA pillars: Medicaid expansion, which increased access to public health insurance, and the Tax Credit Premium, subsidizing the purchase of private health insurance. Using 2012-2015 daily diary data from the American Time Use Survey, we take a triple differences-in-differences approach, which exploits the cross-state variation in the timing of ACA implementation, together with differences in income eligibility thresholds, to identify the effects at stake. Considering a sample of childless adults, a group not eligible to public health insurance before ACA, we find that the Medicaid expansion reduced their labour supply by over an hour per day, increasing part-time work, while the Premium Tax Credit raised employment by about 7 percentage points. The implications for other uses of time are also studied.

Keywords: Affordable Care Act; labor supply; time allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I13 J08 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15415.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:iza:izadps:dp15415

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().