Workers' compensation insurance provides cash payments and medical benefits to workers who incur a work-related injury or illness. Many features of the workers' compensation program parallel features of proposed mandated employer-paid health insurance plans. This paper empirically examines the...

The adoption of workers' compensation in the 1910s, from a variety of perspectives, was a significant event in the economic, legal, and political history of the United States. The legislation represented the first instance of a widespread social insurance program in the United States, setting...

Despite the adoption of no-fault Workers' Compensation legislation in most states, there is substantial litigation over the issue of employer liability for injury claims. We develop a sequential asymmetric information model of liability disputes and estimate the model using data on injury claims...

There is ongoing policy debate about whether government insurance coverage mandates are necessary to effectively address market failures in private insurance markets. This paper analyzes the demand for insurance in the absence of a coverage mandate and the potential market failure rationale for...

Parallel reimbursement regimes, under which providers have some discretion over which payer gets billed for patient treatment, are a common feature of health care markets. In the U.S., the largest such system is under Workers' Compensation (WC), where the treatment workers with injuries that are...

This paper examines the effect of workers' compensation on the time until an injured worker returns to work. Two large increases in the maximum weekly benefit amount in Kentucky am Michigan are examined. The increases raised the benefit amount for high earnings individuals by over sixty percent,...

A central question concerning the economic motivation for the adoption of workers' compensation is the extent to which workers had access to their desired levels of private accident insurance around the turn of the century. If insurance were rationed then workers' primary option would have been...

Although workers, employers, and insurance companies by 1910 supported the adoption of workers' compensation, they fiercely debated the specific features of the legislation. In this paper we examine how workers' compensation benefit levels were determined in the political process of forging...

This paper provides an analysis and summary of the effects of the Workers' Compensation (WC) system on wages and work injury experience. It stresses how lessons learned from other forms of social insurance can be applied to research on WC. I begin with a brief overview of the characteristics of...

In addition to traditional forms of private and public medical insurance, two other large programs help pay for costs associated with ill health. In 2007, Workers Compensation (WC) insurance provided $55.4 billion in medical care and cash benefits to employees who are injured at work or contract...