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 patterns of labor usage. If and when the new exchange plans are competitive with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), our model suggests that more than 20 million people will leave ESI as a consequence of the law. Behavioral changes that are captured in the model could add about 3 million participants to the new exchange plans: beyond those that would participate solely as the result of employer decisions to stop offering coverage and beyond those who would have been uninsured. Industries and regions will grow, decline, and change coverage on the basis of their relative demand for skilled labor.

The Affordable Care Act's taxes, subsidies, and regulations significantly alter terms of trade in both goods and factor markets. The authors use an extended version of the classic Harberger model to predict and quantify consequences of the Affordable Care Act for the incidence of health insurance coverage and patterns of labour usage. If and when the new exchange plans are competitive with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), their model predicts that more than 22 million people will leave ESI as a consequence of the law. Behavioural changes are expected to add two million participants to the new exchange plans: beyond those that would participate solely as the result of employer decisions to stop offering coverage and beyond those who would have been uninsured. They find large differences in coverage-pattern impacts based on the benefit (including tax incentives) of joining exchange plans and degree to which statutory penalties on individuals and firms are implemented. If exchange plans were not valued while the individual mandate were fully enforced, ESI could potentially even expand.

Our paper documents the large labor market wedges created by taxes, subsidies, and regulations included in the Affordable Care Act. The law changes terms of trade in both goods and factor markets for firms offering health insurance coverage. We use a multi-sector (intra-national) trade model to predict and quantify consequences of the Affordable Care Act for the patterns of output, labor usage, and employee compensation. We find that the law will significantly redistribute from high-wage workers to low-wage workers and to non-workers, reduce total factor productivity about one percent, reduce per-capita labor hours about three percent (especially among low-skill workers), reduce output per capita about two percent, and reduce employment less for sectors that ultimately pay employer penalties.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) remains one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in a generation, and the full impacts of the law continue to be debated. Initial forecasts of how many individuals would gain health insurance coverage, as well as how the law's subsidies and regulations would impact the labor market, differ considerably from subsequent studies that have examined its effects. In this paper I use updated data from the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2012-2016 to analyze the impact of the ACA and its attendant expansion of Medicaid in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Specifically, I investigate the relationship between the law and health insurance coverage, labor force participation, and number of hours worked per week. I find that both the ACA and Medicaid expansions are significantly associated with substantial increases in health insurance coverage. As predicted by economic theory, I find that the ACA is associated with a decrease in labor force participation, but the Medicaid expansion separately is not. I also find that a significant and positive relationship between the ACA and the number of hours worked per week. Together, this paper supports the conclusion that the ACA has effectively increased the number of Americans with health insurance coverage, and provides important insight into its more complicated relationship with the labor force.

This paper examines how the value of health insurance affects labor supply, exploiting a quasi-experimental change in health insurance provision - i.e., the Affordable Care Act (ACA) dependent coverage mandate implemented in 2010. Using difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, and regression kink designs, I find no evidence of the labor market impact of the ACA dependent coverage mandate despite its substantial impact on insurance coverage for young adults. I also show that the "aging-out-at-26" condition in eligibility leads to low valuation of insurance and in turn no change in the labor supply of young adults.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) imposes several types of incentives that will affect work schedules. The largest of them are (1) an explicit penalty on employers who do not offer coverage to their full-time employees; (2) an implicit tax on full-time employment, stemming from the fact that full-time employees at employers that offer affordable coverage are ineligible to receive subsidies on the law's new health insurance exchanges; and (3) an implicit tax on earnings, stemming from the provisions of the law that give lower subsidies to those with higher incomes. The labor market will likely adjust to the various new costs by reducing weekly employment per person by about 3%. The tax incentives will push some workers to work more hours per week (for the weeks that they are on a payroll), and others to work fewer. According to the model presented in this paper, the ACA's incentives and ultimately its behavioral effects will vary substantially across groups, with the elderly experiencing hardly any new incentives and female workers being most likely to cut their work schedules to 29 hours per week.

The US does not have universal healthcare coverage for all its citizens. Instead, institutions have been cobbled together, with coverage varying from person to person. Some forms of health insurance are part of the compensation for employment, while others can be accessed whether the person is employed or not. Employers and the government provide most people their health insurance. The Affordable Care Act has mandated all employers with at least 50 full time employees to cover the health insurance of at least 95 percent of the employees. This coverage is borne as a cost by the employer. My thesis uses longitudinal data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which includes individual-level responses to many demographic and socioeconomic questions) to estimate the impact of insurance cost by observing two sets of time periods (before the mandate is imposed and after the mandate is imposed) to study what has been the impact on variables such as wages, for people who are the heads of their households and what the variation is based on (such as race, age, level of education, and marital status).