These findings suggest that WIC may increase health care costs in some dimensions while reducing it in others, and more work is needed to fully evaluate the impact of the program on future expenditures.

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We estimate that prenatal care has positive impacts on health measured at birth, shifts the distribution of future health care utilization away from inpatient care, and find that some of these impacts likely come from an informational mechanism. We also find well child visits are used in a complementary fashion with emergency department care in the production of infant health, suggesting that factors beyond barriers to access may drive the demand for emergency care. Finally, we find differential impacts of prenatal care across racial groups with evidence that the information mechanism may be particularly important for black mothers.

The common practice of linking employment with certain fringe benefits, notably health insurance, has long been thought to impede labor market mobility, thereby producing a phenomenon called job lock. A sizable literature has developed theoretical frameworks for how job lock impacts the labor market and empirically estimated the magnitudes of these effects. However, most empirical studies rely on identification strategies that do not separately identify productivity enhancing from productivity reducing labor market mobility. This article develops a simple theoretical framework showing how prior identification strategies confound both types of mobility and outlines conditions where productivity reducing mobility is of greatest concern.

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