Since at least the early 1990s, economists have found substantial evidence of "job lock" in the United States: workers who get health insurance from their employer are less likely to switch jobs. Early work showed stronger job lock among groups that place a higher value on health insurance,...

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated that private insurance plans extend coverage to adult dependents under the age of 26. We hypothesize that this policy may have had the unintended consequence of increasing "job lock" among parents who would otherwise leave their employer. We use a...