Full Citation

Title: The Effect of Health Insurance on Young Adults' Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act's Dependent Coverage Expansion

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2016

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Abstract: In this paper, I measure the effect of gaining dependent coverage on labor market outcomes of young adults. The ACA's expansion provides a natural experiment where I can exploit the exogenous source of variation in insurance coverage brought on by the law to instrument for health insurance status. In other words, the expansion provides a way to study the effects of gaining health insurance without coverage being linked with individual-level characteristics such as income or labor status, which wouldve biased any estimates. This instrumentation allows me to mitigate the endogeneity present between health insurance and labor status. I first measure the causal effect of the ACAs dependent coverage expansion on insurance rates of post-college age young adults using a difference-in-differences (DD) design, where the difference of the changes within affected and unaffected groups provides a causal effect of the expansion. I define treated ages as 23-25, and control ages as 27-29, as they are most similar in their demographic characteristics and labor supply decisions. Then using a two-stage residual inclusion control function method, I instrument for insurance coverage status to find a causal effect of dependent coverage on labor force status, labor supply, and income.

Url: http://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1168&context=hc_sas_etds

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Authors: Hassan, Quazi

Institution: Hunter College, City University of New York

Department: Economics

Advisor: Partha Deb

Degree: Master of Arts

Publisher Location: New York, NY

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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Health, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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