I examine whether the 2014 Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act reduces “job lock,” defined as the reluctance to leave a job with employer-provided health insurance for a more desirable employment situation with no health insurance offer.
This project contributes to the debate over the relationship between welfare and labor market behavior, including the recent controversy surrounding the push to mandate employment as a Medicaid eligibility requirement for able-bodied adult Medicaid recipients.
Taking advantage of spatial and temporal variation in implementation of the Medicaid expansion, I run difference-in-difference regressions using longitudinal data from the Current Population Survey. I look at a number of labor market outcomes—including employment, labor force participation, part-time employment, and self-employment—to see how the policy influences labor market behavior. My sample includes U.S. citizens who would likely have become newly eligible for Medicaid in 2014 according to the national expansion guidelines, disregarding whether an individual's state actually participated in the expansion.
The current literature suggests that health insurance policy has a substantial impact on labor market behavior and that improved access to health coverage reduces job lock. Existing studies of the 2014 Medicaid expansion find that labor market effects are not observable on a national scale in the first year and a half after the expansion, but appear to be emerging overtime. This project lengthens the timeline of inquiry by one year from the existing literature to better explore these time-lagged effects.
