The political implications and economic consequences of health care reforms are the subject of this book. Its six chapters, authored by a select group of leading health economists, provide insights useful for evaluating further developments in the health care reform debate.

This research examines the behaviors of firms with respect to their provision of health care prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) deliberations and uses those behaviors to forecast changes in employer-sponsored health insurance that might occur once the ACA is fully implemented. Addonizio and...

Greenwood and McDowell develop empirical models that enable them to examine the influence of two important determinants - source country characteristics and U.S. immigration policy - on the gender, age, and skills of immigrants coming to America.

Kimmel and Hoffman present a set of topical, non-technical papers authored by nationally known experts in this field. Using an economic perspective, they confront work/family issues including child care (potentially the biggest obstacle to parents successfully integrating work and family...

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay)....

Leading Policy analysts examine the challenges facing U.S. labor market policy and propose concrete steps to make American workers and employers more competitive in a global economy.

This paper examines the labor market effects of state health insurance mandates that increase the cost of employing a demographically identifiable group. State mandates requiring that health insurance plans cover infertility treatment raise the relative cost of insuring older women of...

Thomason, Schmidle, and Burton make use of a unique data set to delve into how insurance arrangements affect several objectives of the workers' compensation (WC) program. They underscore the effects of deregulation and other changes in WC insurance pricing arrangements by performing empirical...

This collection of original papers reveals why caseloads of the nation's two largest income entitlement programs for disability - Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) - have soared.