IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/09-27.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Health Insurance and Productivity: Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector

Author

Listed:
  • Sang Nguyen
  • Alice Zawacki

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between employer-sponsored offers of health insurance and establishments’ labor productivity. Our empirical work is based on unique plant level data that links the 1997 and 2002 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component with the 1992, 1997, and 2002 Census of Manufactures. These linked data provide information on employer-provided insurance and productivity. We find that health insurance offers are positively associated with levels of establishments’ labor productivity. These findings hold for all manufacturers as well as those with fewer than 100 employees. Our preliminary results also show a drop in health care costs from the 75th to the 25th percentile would increase the probability of a plant offering insurance by 1.5-2.0 percent in both 1997 and 2002. The results from this paper provide encouraging and new empirical evidence on the benefits employers may reap by offering health insurance to workers.

Suggested Citation

  • Sang Nguyen & Alice Zawacki, 2009. "Health Insurance and Productivity: Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector," Working Papers 09-27, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:09-27
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2009/CES-WP-09-27.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2009
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lacroix, G & Brouard M-E, 2011. "Work Absenteeism Due to a Chronic Disease," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 11/15, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.
    2. Srikant Devaraj & Pankaj C Patel, 2017. "Health insurance and employee productivity: Findings from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 37(2), pages 1351-1364.
    3. C. J. Krizan & Adela Luque & Alice Zawacki, 2014. "The Effect Of Employer Health Insurance Offering On The Growth And Survival Of Small Business Prior To The Affordable Care Act," Working Papers 14-22, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Employer-provided health insurance; labor productivity; manufacturing industries;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:09-27. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dawn Anderson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.