How Does Health Insurance Affect Firm Employment and Performance? Evidence from Obamacare
54 Pages Posted: 21 Nov 2017 Last revised: 4 Feb 2021
Date Written: January 15, 2021
Abstract
This paper studies how mandating employers to provide health insurance of a minimum quality and the associated increases in health insurance premia affect firm employment and performance. To do so, we use hand-collected firm-level employee health insurance data. We find that employers with greater exposure to the PPACA (“Obamacare”) reduce enrollments in their health insurance plans to a larger extent after the law was enacted. Employers achieve this reduction in enrollment by shifting employment composition from full-time to part-time employees. We further show that firms that are less likely to adjust their employment composition experience deterioration in performance.
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