Dependent Coverage and Parental "Job Lock": Evidence from the Affordable Care Act

A common feature of employer-sponsored insurance is coverage for dependents. While prior work shows that employees trade off job mobility for their own coverage, there is less evidence on the intra-family spillovers of dependent coverage onto parental labor supply. We study this using a panel of insurance claims that links dependent insurance enrollment with a proxy for parental job tenure. We develop a regression discontinuity design that exploits variation in coverage eligibility by dependent birth date from the Affordable Care Act. We find that a one percent increase in the dependent enrollment likelihood increases parental job retention by 0.20 percent.