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The Incidence of Mandated Employer-Provided Insurance: Lessons from Workers' Compensation Insurance

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Jonathan Gruber
Alan B. Krueger

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Abstract

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 incidence of the workers' compensation program to infer the likely consequences of mandated health insurance proposals. In certain industries, such as trucking and carpentry, workers' compensation insurance costs are quite large, and vary tremendously within states over time, and across states at a moment in time. This variation is used to identify the incidence of the program. Empirical analysis of two data sets suggest that changes in employers' costs of workers' compensation insurance are largely shifted to employees in the form of lower wages. In addition, higher insurance costs are found to have a negative but statistically insignificant effect on employment. The implied elasticity of labor demand from our results is about -.50.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 3557.

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Date of creation: Dec 1990
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3557

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Arleen Leibowitz, 1983. "Fringe Benefits in Employee Compensation," NBER Chapters, in: The Measurement of Labor Cost, pages 371-394 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!]
  2. Clark, Kim B & Freeman, Richard B, 1980. "How Elastic is the Demand for Labor?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 62(4), pages 509-20, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  3. Brown, Charles, 1980. "Equalizing Differences in the Labor Market," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 94(1), pages 113-34, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Duncan, Greg J & Hill, Daniel H, 1985. "An Investigation of the Extent and Consequences of Measurement Error in Labor-Economic Survey Data," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(4), pages 508-32, October. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Robert S. Smith & Ronald G. Ehrenberg, 1983. "Estimating Wage-Fringe Trade-Offs: Some Data Problems," NBER Chapters, in: The Measurement of Labor Cost, pages 347-370 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!]
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  6. Holzer, Harry J & Katz, Lawrence F & Krueger, Alan B, 1991. "Job Queues and Wages," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 106(3), pages 739-68, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Patricia M. Danzon, 1990. "Mandated Employment-Based Health Insurance:Incidence and Efficiency Effects," University of Chicago - George G. Stigler Center for Study of Economy and State 60, Chicago - Center for Study of Economy and State.
  8. Ashenfelter, Orley & Smith, Robert S, 1979. "Compliance with the Minimum Wage Law," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(2), pages 333-50, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  9. Holmlund, Bertil, 1983. " Payroll Taxes and Wage Inflation: The Swedish Experience," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 85(1), pages 1-15.
  10. Summers, Lawrence H, 1989. "Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(2), pages 177-83, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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