Beyond death: The impact of a population-wide health shock on life insurance

Population-wide health shocks, for example, pandemics, affect life insurance owners beyond their health impact. This paper considers joint impacts of their surrender behavior adaptions and mortality rise following a population-wide health shock on insurance pricing. We build a model that captures both more surrenders of contracts to meet unexpected liquidity needs and less financially beneficial surrenders to keep insurance protection after the shock. Unlike the systemic mortality rise impact that turns out to be negligible, we find that policyholders’ surrender behavior adaptions substantially devalue policies with increasing emergency surrenders being the main driver. Regulatory solvency protection partly restrains the devaluation.     

The short-run impact of the stock market appreciation of the 1980s and 1990s on U.S. income inequality

The paper uses 1980 to 2000 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data to study the short-run effect of a stock market appreciation on U.S. household income inequality. Fixed-effects regressions suggest that a stock market appreciation raises the incomes of stockholder households more than non-stockholder households. The Gini coefficients derived from the regressions reveal a perceptible but rather volatile increase that can be attributed to the stock market appreciation, especially for the latter parts of the 1980s and 1990s. When averaged by decade, the stock market appreciation raises the Gini coefficient by about 2% for the 1980s and by 3% for the 1990s.     

The impact of unemployment insurance taxes on wages

This paper examines the incidence of state unemployment insurance taxes on wages paid to workers in various demographic groups. The empirical work matches state level measures of unemployment insurance tax and benefit variables to data aggregated from the Current Population Survey on worker earnings for the period 1992 to 2002. Econometric evidence presented in the paper supports the paper's main hypothesis that UI tax rate structure has its greatest adverse impact on less mobile workers (prime age married women and young workers) and little impact on more mobile workers (prime age men).     

The behavioural impact on trade unionists of the trade union legislation of the 1980s: a research note

This note is concerned with research conducted through a survey of trade union lay representatives to identify their perceptions of the current law and attitudes to compliance/non-compliance with it. Emphasis is placed on how any misconceptions could affect the conduct of an industrial dispute.     

Transitions to self-employment at older ages: The role of wealth,health, health insurance and other factors

Relatively little research has been devoted to studying self-employment among older workers although they make up a disproportionate share of the self-employed workforce. This study uses 5 waves of panel data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the determinants of labor force transitions to self-employment at older ages. We estimate a multinomial logit model of transitions from wage and salary employment to self-employment, retirement or not working. Results are compared with those found in previous studies. New findings on the impact of health on transitions to self-employment are highlighted.     

The human resource potential of Americans over 50

This article analyzes whether many Americans over age 50 want to return to work. It estimates that among males ages 55 to 64 and females ages 50 to 59 currently not working 1.1 million persons are ready and able to work, have substantial skills and education, would work in high demand occupations, and are flexible about conditions of employment.     

The impact of consumer health information on the demand for health services

This paper empirically examines whether consumers use health information, from non-physician information sources, as a substitute or complement for health services – namely for physician visits and emergency room (ER) visits. An indicator of patient trust in physicians is developed and used as a proxy for potential unobserved heterogeneity that may drive both consumers’ propensity to seek information and to use physician services. The results, after correcting for sample selection bias and controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, concur with the literature, that consumer health information increases the likelihood of visiting a physician as well as the frequency of visits on average. However, low-trust consumers tend to substitute self-care through consumer health information for physician services. Further, better-informed consumers make significantly fewer ER visits suggesting that information may be improving efficiency in the market.     

Testing the significance of income distribution changes over the 1980s business cycle: a cross-national comparison

Using kernel density estimation we describe the distribution of household size-adjusted real income and how it changed over the business cycle of the 1980s in the United States and the United Kingdom. We confirm previous studies that show income inequality increased in the two countries and the middle of the distribution was squashed down. Using a series of statistical tests, however, we find that while the mass in both tails of the distribution increased significantly in both countries over the period, by far the greatest gains were in the upper tail. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The future of fund raising: developments in the 1980s

Those institutions that survive the "combined onslaught" of inflation, taxes and other stubborn foes that will continue to beset them in the decade to come can only be strengthened by their tribulations, the author claims. With the aid of his "crystal ball", he views what the 1980s have in store for philanthropy.     

Health insurance reform: The impact of a Medicare buy-in

The steady-state general equilibrium and welfare consequences of a Medicare buy-in program, optional for those aged 55–64, is evaluated in a calibrated life-cycle economy with incomplete markets. Incomplete markets and adverse selection create a potential welfare improving role for health insurance reform. We find that adverse selection eliminates any market for a Medicare buy-in if it is offered as an unsubsidized option to individual private health insurance. The subsidy needed to bring the number of uninsured to less than 5 percent of the target population could be financed by an increase in the labor income tax rate of just 0.03–0.18 percent depending on how the program is implemented.     

The work disincentive effects of the disability insurance program in the 1990s

In this paper we evaluate the work disincentive effects of the disability insurance (DI) program during the 1990s using comparison group and regression-discontinuity methods. The latter approach exploits a particular feature of the DI eligibility determination process to estimate the program's impact on labor supply for an important subset of DI applicants. Using merged survey-administrative data, we find that during the 1990s the labor force participation rate of DI beneficiaries would have been at most 20 percentage points higher had none received benefits. In addition, we find even smaller labor supply responses for the subset of ‘marginal’ applicants whose disability determination is based on vocational factors.     

The dynamic effects of health on the labor force transitions of older workers

This paper addresses the interplay between health and labor market behavior in the later part of the working life. We use the longitudinal Health and Retirement Survey to analyze the dynamic relationship between health and alternative labor force transitions, including labor force exit, job change and application for disability insurance. Specifically, we examine how the timing of health shocks affects labor force behavior. Controlling for lagged values of health, poor contemporaneous health is strongly associated with labor force exit in general and with application for disability insurance in particular. At the same time, our evidence suggests that controlling for contemporaneous health, poor lagged health is associated with continued participation. Thus, it appears that not just poor health, but declines in health help explain retirement behavior. We conclude that modeling health in a dynamic, longitudinal framework offers important new insights into the effects of poor health on the labor force behavior of older workers.     

The role of asset testing in public health insurance reform

Starting slowly with the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and culminating in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, means-tested public health insurance eligibility expanded to include adults in low-income families regardless of their asset holdings. This paper quantifies the effects of these eligibility expansions within the context of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. I construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with indivisible labor supply expanded to include an endogenous household choice of health insurance coverage and calibrate it to U.S. data. I establish that changes in the distribution of labor and welfare associated with removal of asset testing are driven by exit of high productivity and high wealth households from the labor market. I then expand my analysis to the 2010 Affordable Care Act to demonstrate that removal of asset testing is critical to the obtained results even when combined with other provisions of the Act. Finally, I find that a simple asset test for eligibility of health insurance transfers undoes the distortion to the household labor supply decision among high productivity types. These results are robust to the introduction of employer premium contributions, an independent health insurance market, and idiosyncratic shocks to eligibility for employment-based health insurance.