Dependent Coverage and Parental "Job Lock": Evidence from the Affordable Care Act

Hannah Bae, Katherine Meckel and Maggie Shi

No 30200, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Coverage for dependents is a standard feature of employer-sponsored insurance. While prior work shows that employees trade off job mobility for their own coverage, less is known about the intra-family spillovers of dependent coverage on parental labor supply. We study this question using a large panel of employer-based insurance claims that links dependent enrollment to a proxy for parental job retention. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits a sharp change in the duration of dependent eligibility by birth month under the Affordable Care Act. We find that additional dependent insurance eligibility increases both dependent take-up and parental job retention. This “job lock” effect is strongest among parents more likely to be on the margin of a job exit, for families that place higher value on dependent coverage, and employees of firms offering a broader range of insurance options.

JEL-codes: H0 I13 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: AG CH EH PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30200.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:nbr:nberwo:30200

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30200

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().