NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

The Effect of the Medicaid Program on Welfare Participation and Labor Supply

Robert Moffitt, Barbara Wolfe

NBER Working Paper No. 3286*
Issued in March 1990
NBER Program(s):   HE    LS    PE

The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.

Although there is a large literature on the effect of AFDC and Food

Stamps on labor supply and welfare participation, there has been little work

on the effects of Medicaid, despite its importance in the O.S. transfer

system. In this paper we use 1986 data from the Survey of Income and Program

Participation to examine the effect of Medicaid on the labor supply and

welfare participation decisions of female heads of family. A key contribution

is the development of a family-specific proxy for the valuation of Medicaid

benefits which depends upon the health and other characteristics of the

family. We find that Medicaid has strong and significant effects on labor

supply and welfare participation that are negative and positive in sign,

respectively, but which are concentrated in the tail of the distribution with

the highest expected medical expenditures. We also find that the availability

and level of private health insurance have very large effects opposite in sign

to those of Medicaid.

*Published: "The Effect of the Medicaid Program on Welfare and Participation and Labor Supply", Review of Economic Statistics, November 1992, Volume 74, No. 4 pp. 615-626

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Information about Free Papers

You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, a site with your domain name in ".GOV", or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.

If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.

E-mail:

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org