Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Part-Time Employment: Early Evidence

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in ABSTRACTThe Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires employers with at least 50 full-time-equivalent employees to offer "affordable" health insurance to employees working 30 or more hours per week. If employers do not comply with the mandate, they may face substantial financial penalties. Employers can potentially circumvent the mandate by reducing weekly hours below the 30-hour threshold or by using other nonstandard employment arrangements (direct-hire temporaries, agency temporaries, small contractors, and independent contractors). We examine the effects of the ACA on short-hours, part-time employment. Using monthly CPS data, we estimate that the ACA resulted in an increase in low-hours, involuntary part-time employment of a half-million to a million workers in retail, accommodations, and food services, the sectors in which employers are most likely to reduce hours if they choose to circumvent the mandate, and also the sectors in which low-wage workers are most likely to be affected. Our empirical strategy uses as a control group Hawaii, which has had a more stringent employer health insurance mandate than that of the ACA for several decades. The findings are robust to placebo tests and alternative specifications. JEL Classification Codes: I13, J23, J3

The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage and Labor Market Outcomes

“…In addition to these studies, several descriptive analyses have used a variety of novel data sources to document the ACA's impact on coverage (Long et al 2014;Smith and Medalia 2014;Carman et al 2015;Black and Cohen 2015;Courtemanche et al 2016) and some authors have modeled the impact of the ACA on labor supply (Heim, Hunter, Lurie, and Ramnath 2014;Mulligan 2014Mulligan , 2015aMulligan , 2015bFang and Shephard 2015). Also, note that some studies have found evidence of changes in labor demand in occupations and industries most affected by the employer shared responsibility requirement, resulting in an increase in involuntary part-time work (Even and Macpherson 2016;Dillender et al 2016).…”

Red-State Medicaid Expansions — Achilles’ Heel of ACA Repeal?

“…Similarly, average hours worked has increased by about 0.2 hours per week in both Medicaid expansion and non-expansion states, inconsistent with the view that Medicaid expansion has put substantial downward pressure on worker hours. Outside estimates using a range of methodologies similarly conclude that there is little evidence that the law has driven a major shift toward part-time work, though some studies have found evidence of small effects (Even and Macpherson 2015;Mathur, Slavov, and Strain 2016;Moriya, Selden, and Simon 2016;Dillender, Heinrich, and Houseman 2016). …”

The Affordable Care Act and the Growth of Involuntary Part-Time Employment

“…Dillender et al (2016a) used a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the effect of the ACA on part-time work. Their analysis treated Hawaii as a control group since the state had previously passed legislation that would make passage of the ACA employer mandate unimportant.…”

“…Although other research has examined the impact of the ACA or other state-specific employer mandates on part-time work, our study goes beyond the earlier work. Previous studies use difference-in-difference methods that compare the rate of growth in part-time work across states based on whether they had passed a state-specific employer mandate (e.g., Dillender, Heinrich, and Houseman 2016a, 2016b). Ours is the first study to use a difference-in-difference method comparing the rate of growth in part-time work across occupations based on the extent to which the mandate is likely to be binding.…”