Will Extending Medicaid to Two-Parent Families Encourage Marriage?
研究美国1980-1990年代医疗补助改革取消对单亲家庭的限制后，是否鼓励了结婚。改革使结婚概率提高1.7个百分点，但同时也产生了离婚激励。
Several welfare programs in the United States restrict eligibility to single-parent families. This paper asks whether eliminating this restriction for Medicaid encourages marriage. I identify Medicaid's effect through a series of health insurance reforms that were passed in the 1980s and 1990s targeting young children. These reforms were associated with an increase in the probability of marriage of 1.7 percentage points. While the expansions offered some incentives to become married, they also created other incentives to become divorced (known as the effect). After controlling for the outflows from marriage due to the independence effect, the estimated effect increases by 10 percent.