The Affordable Care Act and College Enrollment Decisions

Juergen Jung and Vinish Shrestha

No 2016-16, Working Papers from Towson University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We investigate the effect of the extension of the federal dependent coverage mandate for young adults under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the college enrollment decisions of young Americans. The ACA removes the conditionality that young individuals need to be enrolled as full-time students in order to be able to remain on their parents' health insurance past the age of 18 and extends the coverage mandate to age 26 irrespective of student status. This expansion of the coverage mandate changes the incentives for the full-time and part-time college enrollment decisions of young individuals. We use panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) for the years 2003–2013 and estimate that the dependent coverage expansion under the ACA decreases the probability to enroll as full-time student by 2 to 3 percentage points. Furthermore we find that part-time college enrollment is unaffected by the new policy. The results from a difference-in-differences model are robust to changes in the model specification and become stronger when we increase the sample overlap between treatment and control groups using trimming based on propensity scores.

Keywords: Affordable Care Act; dependent health insurance coverage; youth health insurance; occupational choice; educational choice; survey of income and program participation (SIPP). (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 I10 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2016-10, Revised 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://webapps.towson.edu/cbe/economics/workingpapers/2016-16.pdf First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT AND COLLEGE ENROLLMENT DECISIONS (2018)
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:tow:wpaper:2016-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Towson University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Juergen Jung ().