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Is Formal Employment Discouraged by the Provision of Free. Health Services to the Uninsured ? Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Mexico

Author

Listed:
  • Alejandro del Valle

    (PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

This article analyzes whether the large scale provision of non-contributory health services encourages workers to move away from jobs that pay contributions to social security (formal employment). Using a difference-in-differences design, that exploits the variation generated by the municipal level roll-out of an intervention of this kind in Mexico, this paper finds that contemporaneous program exposure has no impact on the ratio of formal to total employed and that lagged exposure leads only to a small (0.78 percentage points) decrease. Two proxies of spillover effects further reveal that this estimate is robust and that the upper-bound of program effect is only moderately larger (1.5 percentage points).

Suggested Citation

  • Alejandro del Valle, 2013. "Is Formal Employment Discouraged by the Provision of Free. Health Services to the Uninsured ? Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Mexico," Working Papers halshs-00838000, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00838000
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00838000
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    2. Conti, Gabriella & Ginja, Rita & Narita, Renata, 2018. "The Value of Health Insurance: A Household Job Search Approach," IZA Discussion Papers 11706, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

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    Keywords

    Labor Markets; Health Provision; Informality; Spillover Effects;
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