The incidence of obesity has increased dramatically in the U.S. Obese individuals tend to be sicker and spend more on health care, raising the question of who bears the incidence of obesity-related health care costs. This question is particularly interesting among those with group coverage...

Many companies have defined-contribution benefit plans requiring employees to pay the full cost (before taxes) of more generous health insurance choices. Research has shown that employee decisions are quite responsive to these arrangements. What is less clear is how the total compensation...

Increases in the cost of providing health insurance must have some effect on labor markets, either in lower wages, changes in the composition of employment, or both. Despite a presumption that most of this effect will be in the form of lower wages, we document in this paper a significant effect...

This paper investigates the current tax subsidy to employer- provided health insurance, and presents new evidence on the economic effects of various tax reforms. It argues that previous analyses have overstated the tax subsidy to employer-provided insurance by neglecting the substantial and...

"Consumer-Directed" Health Plans (CDHPs) combine high deductibles with personal medical accounts and are intended to reduce health care spending through greater patient cost sharing. Prior research shows that CDHPs reduce spending in the first year. However, there is little research on the...

Prior studies suggest that consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) -characterized by high deductibles and health care accounts- reduce health costs, but there is concern that enrollees indiscriminately reduce use of low-value services (e.g., unnecessary emergency department use) and high-value...

We analyze the incidence of public-employee health benefits. Because these benefits are negotiated through the political process, relevant labor market institutions deviate significantly from the competitive, private-sector benchmark. Empirically, we find that roughly 15 percent of the cost of...

The Affordable Care Act's taxes, subsidies, and regulations significantly alter terms of trade in both goods and factor markets. We use a multi-sector (intra-national) trade model to predict and quantify consequences of the Affordable Care Act for the incidence of health insurance coverage and...

Many employers have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. We evaluate a DV program using a panel of health plan enrollment data from a large,...

During the past two decades, union density has declined in the United States and employer provision of health benefits has undergone substantial changes in extent and form. Using individual data spanning the years 1983-1997, combined with establishment data for 1993, we update and extend...