TY - JOUR AU - Ham,John C. AU - Ozbeklik,I. Serkan AU - Shore-Sheppard,Lara TI - Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects of Medicaid Expansions on Take-up and Crowd-out JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 16112 PY - 2010 Y2 - June 2010 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16112 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16112.pdf N1 - Author contact info: John Ham University of Maryland Department of Economics 3105 Tydings Hall College Park, MD 20742 Tel: 818-439-3531 E-Mail: ham@econ.umd.edu Serkan Ozbeklik The Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, Claremont McKenna College 500 E. Ninth Street Claremont, CA 91711 E-Mail: serkan.ozbeklik@cmc.edu Lara Shore-Sheppard Department of Economics Williams College 24 Hopkins Hall Drive Williamstown, MA 01267 Tel: 413/597-2226 Fax: 413/597-4045 E-Mail: lshore@williams.edu AB - Economists have devoted considerable resources to estimating local average treatment effects of expansions in Medicaid eligibility for children. In this paper we use random coefficients linear probability models and switching probit models to estimate a more complete range of effects of Medicaid expansion on Medicaid take-up and crowd-out of private insurance. We demonstrate how to estimate, for Medicaid expansions, the average effect among all of those eligible, the average effect for a randomly chosen person, the effect for a marginally eligible child, and the average effect for those affected by a nonmarginal counterfactual policy change. We then estimate the average effect of Medicaid expansions among all eligible children and the average effect for those affected by a nonmarginal counterfactual Medicaid expansion since these are likely to be the most useful for policy analysis. Estimated take-up rates among average eligible children are substantially larger than take-up rates for those made eligible by a counterfactual Medicaid expansion, moreover both of these effects vary widely across demographic groups. In terms of crowd-out, we find statistically significant, though small, effects for all eligible children, but not for those affected by a counterfactual policy change. ER -