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How Many Americans Have Lost Jobs with Employer Health Coverage During the Pandemic?
Get PDFISSUE: During the COVID-19 pandemic, most states issued lockdown orders that closed many workplaces. The ensuing job losses may have left millions of workers without employer health coverage.
GOAL: To estimate how many workers lost jobs that came with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) — by industry, age, and gender — during the pandemic.
METHODS: Health insurance coverage data were used to generate the proportion of workers with ESI, by various characteristics. Data on unemployment benefit recipients were used to generate the proportion of workers who lost jobs because of the pandemic. We apply the proportion of workers with ESI to the number of workers who lost jobs to obtain an estimate of jobs with ESI coverage that were lost. We also determine the number of dependents of these workers who potentially lost coverage.
KEY FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION: We estimate that as many as 7.7 million workers lost jobs with ESI as of June 2020 because of the pandemic-induced recession. The ESI of these workers covered 6.9 million of their dependents, for a total of 14.6 million affected individuals. Only with time will we know how many job losses are ultimately permanent, resulting in loss of ESI for workers and their dependents
The Determinants of Performance-Pay Utilization by Firms and Its Consequences for Firm Behavior, Performance and Employee Outcomes
No full textPerformance pay is a classic economic tool to align incentives of worker and employers, yet the widespread adoption of such pay schemes has led to two concerns. First, growth in such schemes may have been driven by rent extraction rather than profit maximization. Second, there is little evidence as to whether performance pay provides the intended productivity benefits. This paper uses a natural experiment to address both questions. Our study exploits a UK tax reform that introduced tax advantages for firms that use employee share option schemes. We plan to leverage eligibility thresholds and compare nearly identical firms facing different costs of using such incentive schemes. In a first step, we test how much the utilization of performance pay responds to changes in the returns of such schemes. Second, we test if these incentive schemes improve firm outcomes. We study both traditional profit metrics, as well as effects on the distribution of returns within the firm. Our project will combine administrative tax data with data on incentive scheme use and exploit quasi-experimental variation in rules that determine tax exemptions to identify the causal effect of performance pay on firm-level outcomes
Lessons from the American Federal‐State Unemployment Insurance System for a European Unemployment Benefits System
No full textEmployer Market Power in High- and Low-Earning Jobs
No full textFrom 1970 to 2014 the labor share of US GDP fell from 66 to 60 percent (University of Groningen and UC Davis 2018) and other countries have seen similar declines (Karabarbounis and Neiman 2013). Several competing explanations have attracted researcher interest. One strand of work emphasizes neoclassical factors, including trade and technological change (Autor et al. 2017a; Autor et al. 2017b; Grossman et al. 2017). A second emphasizes institutional factors, including declining unionization (Blanchard and Giavazzi 2003) and employer market power (US CEA 2016; Krueger and Posner 2018). Because employer market power typically arises endogenously, it is difficult to separate from other determinants of labor earnings. Moreover in the United States, explicit collusion to depress labor compensation is illegal under the Sherman Act, and exercising market power is illegal under the Clayton Act (US Department of Justice 2010; Marinescu and Hovenkamp 2018). This gives firms engaged in such behavior powerful incentives to hide it from both government officials and researchers. Two recent natural experiments provide rare opportunities to identify causal effects of employer market power: 1) the unraveling of the 2005-2009 no-poach agreements among Silicon Valley technology firms; and 2) the 2018-2019 abandonment of franchise noncompete clauses by chains in the face of legal pressure from the Attorney General of Washington
Do Stronger Employment Discrimination Protections Decrease Reliance on Social Security Disability Insurance? Evidence from the U.S. Social Security Reforms
Get PDFThe United States Social Security Amendments of 1983 (SSA1983) increased the full retirement age (FRA) and increased penalties for retiring before the FRA. This cut to retirement benefits caused spillover effects on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications and receipt by making SSDI relatively more generous. We explore if stronger disability and age discrimination laws moderated these spillovers, using variation whereby many state laws are broader or stronger than federal law. We estimate the effects of these laws on SSDI applications and receipt using a difference-in-differences approach, comparing cohorts affected by SSA1983 to similarly aged unaffected cohorts, across states. We find that a broader definition of disability, where only a medically diagnosed condition is required to be covered under state law, significantly reduces SSDI applications induced by SSA1983, but has no effect on SSDI receipt, likely because the foregone applications were for those with less severe conditions that were unlikely to have been approved for SSDI. We find some evidence that other broader or stronger features of state disability discrimination laws reduce both SSDI applications and receipt. We do not find much evidence that age discrimination laws reduce spillovers to SSDI. These results suggest that broader and stronger disability discrimination laws reduce employment barriers, allowing older individuals to work longer, possibly reducing reliance on SSDI and costly applications to SSDI