The Effect of Health Insurance on Married Female Labor Supply
利用1993年4月当前人口调查福利补充数据，发现丈夫的健康保险会显著减少妻子的工作时间，尤其在有孩子的家庭中。
We investigate the effects of employer-provided health insurance on the labor supply of married women. Because health benefits commonly are restricted to full-time workers, wives who prefer to work short hours but have no alternate source of insurance may work long hours in order to acquire coverage for their families. We use data from the April 1993 Current Population Survey Benefits Supplement, and we exploit variation in coverage under husbands' health plans to estimate the magnitude of this effect. Our reduced-form labor supply models indicate a strong negative effect of husbands' health insurance on wives' work hours, particularly in families with children. This effect persists when we replace husbands' insurance coverage with husbands' offered insurance, and when we use a multinomial logit model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in family labor supply preferences.