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Journal Article
Employer health benefits and insurance expansions: Hawaii's experience
As policies are proposed to expand health insurance coverage in the United States, it is useful to focus on the experience of Hawaii, where employers are required to offer such insurance to their full-time employees. Our findings suggest that Hawaii?s law has substantially increased health insurance coverage in the state, although the impact has been partially offset by employers' increased reliance on the exempt class of employees who work fewer than 20 hours per week.
Working Paper
The effect of an employer health insurance mandate on health insurance coverage and the demand for labor: evidence from Hawaii
Over the past few decades, policy makers have considered employer mandates as a strategy for stemming the tide of declining health insurance coverage. In this paper we examine the long term effects of the only employer health insurance mandate that has ever been enforced in the United States, Hawaii's Prepaid Health Care Act, using a standard supply-demand framework and Current Population Survey data covering the years 1979 to 2005. During this period, the coverage gap between Hawaii and other states increased, as did real health insurance costs, implying a rising burden of the mandate on ...
Working Paper
Union effects on health insurance provision and coverage in the United States
Since Freeman and Medoff's (1984) comprehensive review of what unions do, union density in the U.S. has fallen substantially. During the same period, employer provision of health insurance has undergone substantial changes in extent and form. Using individual data from various supplements to the Current Population Survey and establishment data from the 1993 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey, we investigate the effects of unionization on employer provision of health benefits. We find that in addition to increasing coverage by employer-provided health benefits, unions reduce employee cost ...
Journal Article
Technology and U.S. wage inequality: a brief look
As labor market analysts in the late 1980s and early 1990s documented a rising wage inequality, a series of papers argued that this development was related to rapid technological change. These papers and the large literature that followed established a basis for the virtually unanimous agreement among economists that developments in computers and related information technologies in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s have led to increased wage inequality. ; This view has become known as the "skill-biased technological change" (SBTC) hypothesis-the view that a burst of new technologies increased ...