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Institutional rules and economies of scale can create incentives for firms to make inframarginal decisions when offering fringe benefits. We examine how such incentives might affect a firm's offer of health insurance.

We develop and estimate an empirical model of the firm's offer of health insurance that includes incentives created by rules and economies of scale. We quantify the behavioral manifestations from rules and costs as recruiting difficulty in areas outside those in which compensation is set and the percentage of high-skilled jobs in the firm and use the California Health and Employment Surveys (CHES) to estimate the model.

We show a 10–13 percentage point increase in the probability of a firm offering workers health insurance in jobs outside of those in which compensation is being set, if the recruiting difficulty lies in mid- or high-skilled positions. This increase is about twice the size of the increase associated with recruiting difficulty in the position in which compensation is negotiated.

A failure to control for the influence of inframarginal decision making when estimating the wage-insurance tradeoff helps produce wrong-signed estimates.

By bringing institutional rules and economies of scale into the framework of a firm's offer of fringe benefits, we help move the focus of the fringe benefit-wage tradeoff away from the individual level.

Using matched data from the 1996 to 2004 Current Population Survey (CPS), we examine racial patterns in annual transitions into and out of health insurance coverage. We first decompose racial differences in static health insurance coverage rates into group differences in transition rates into and out of health insurance coverage. The low rate of health insurance coverage among African-Americans is due almost entirely to higher annual rates of losing health insurance than whites. Among the uninsured, African-Americans have similar rates of gaining health insurance in the following year as whites. Estimates from the matched CPS also indicate that the lower rate of health insurance coverage among Asians is almost entirely accounted for by a relatively high rate of losing health insurance. In contrast to these findings, differences in health insurance coverage between Latinos and whites are due to group differences in both the rate of health insurance loss and gain. Using logit regression estimates, we also calculate nonlinear decompositions for the racial gaps in health insurance loss and gain. We find that two main factors are responsible for differences in health insurance loss between working-age whites and minorities: job loss and education level. Higher rates of job loss account for 30 percent of the health insurance gap for African-Americans and Asians, and 16 percent of the health insurance gap for Latinos. Lower levels of education explain roughly 15 percent of the gap for African-Americans and Latinos (Asians' higher levels of education serve to close the gap). Higher rates of welfare and SSI participation among African-Americans also serve to widen the gap in health insurance loss by 8 percent.

Securing a job in an industry is a boon for most of the slum dwellers. When the primary earner of a slum household suffers from occupational illness and injuries, without insurance coverage or partial coverage of insurance, this boon may become a curse in the long run. The occupational security and safety along with the fact that whether such workers are insured is an important aspect and has a close link with the expenditure on illness. Thus, the accessibility to employees’ insurance in the risky industrial occupation, particularly for slum dwellers, is crucial to protect them from falling into poverty. Studies on occupational health of the poor workers are either limited to informal sectors or remain industry specific and the analysis of their accessibility to job insurance is rarely done. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The research questions are framed to analyze the types of insurance accessible to workers across various industries; the accessibility to insurance, however, varying across risk intensities of various industries; and the determinants of insurance accessibility of the industrial workers living in slums. The determinants of accessibility of job insurance are analyzed with a binary Logit model. A multi-stage random sampling technique is used to collect the primary data from 320 industrial workers living in the slums of the Indian state of West Bengal.

The industrial workers, irrespective of the types of industries, are exposed to a high-risk category without proper job insurance. The higher industrial income is not adequate to prevent financial hardships. Access to insurance is more likely for the respondents with job tenure of more than two years and less likely for the workers who are working for more than eight hours per day.

This study provides a significant insight to the policymakers concerning health dynamics of the slum dwellers, which can improve their livelihood.

The analysis of the industry-specific risk intensities with accessibility to insurance contributes to understanding the coverage of the insurance scheme for the workers in slums.

The paper seeks to examine the impact of social exclusion on individuals' propensity to be employed and how, if employed, social exclusion affects individuals' perceived job insecurity and the likelihood of being covered by social insurance in their jobs.

Using the United Nations Development Program/United Nations Children Fund 2009 survey data from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the paper employs comprehensive econometric methods that overcome challenges posed by endogeneity of social exclusion in labour market outcomes, self‐selection into employment, and the interdependency between perceptions of job security and social insurance coverage.

Results suggest that socially excluded individuals face hurdles in securing jobs and exhibit higher risk of job loss. Further, results suggest that a holistic educational policy could help promote social inclusion.

Formulation of policies aimed at promoting social inclusion and improved labour market outcomes should not be done in isolation; rather they should be based on a holistic understanding of the multi‐faceted nature of social exclusion.

The originality of the analysis is that it takes into account the multi‐dimensional nature of social exclusion by treating social exclusion as an outcome of a diverse set of an individual's socio‐economic characteristics that ultimately shape the way they feel about their exclusion or inclusion in their societies. This gives an indication of the types of people that are socially excluded and form the group for which a further investigation of labour market outcomes is conducted.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2008, this study examines how employment precarity is associated with the transition to first marriage. Building upon research on precarious work and economic determinants of marriage, I employ various measures of precarious work, including health insurance coverage, the provision of pension benefits, and part-time work. Results from the discrete-time hazard models show that precarious work delays men’s marriage entry more than women’s. For men, all indicators of precarious work decrease the odds of first marriage by up to 40%. Compared to men, women’s entry into first marriage is delayed when they have part-time employment. My study findings contribute to the theoretical discussions of the causes of family inequality, which have suggested the precarization of work and associated deterioration of job quality as one of the leading influences on the retreat from marriage. Further, results of this study indicate that the spread of precarious work has profound social consequences through its impact on family formation. In light of limited empirical research on the impact of precarious work on non-work-related outcomes, subsequent research needs to continue examining how employment precarity and family inequality are intertwined with various substantive foci across societies.

A dynamic model of the evolution of health for those over the age of 50 is embedded in a structural, econometric model of retirement and saving. Effects of smoking, obesity, alcohol consumption, depression, and other proclivities on medical conditions are analyzed, including hypertension, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, heart problems, stroke, psychiatric problems, and arthritis. Compared to a population in good health, the current health of the population reduces retirement age by about one year. Including detailed health dynamics in a retirement model does not influence estimates of the marginal effects of economic incentives on retirement.

As a “fictitious commodity” (Polanyi), that cannot be separated from the human being who is its owner, labor has a special moral significance. However, this moral quality is not a given but must be asserted in struggles over the value of labor. With the example of disabled workers in Switzerland, this chapter examines the moralization of labor as a means to revalue a category of workers who range far down the labor queue. Moralization mediates the tension between the normative societal goal of inclusion for disabled people and the freedom of employers to select the most “productive” workers. Drawing on the theoretical approach of the Economics of Convention the chapter analyzes the valuation frames proposed by economic and welfare state actors in political debates over the establishment of the Swiss disability insurance and the role of employers regarding occupational integration. A core concept used in negotiations of the value of disabled labor in the public arena and within individual businesses is the “social responsibility” of employers. Historically, employers’ associations successfully promoted the liberal principle of voluntary responsibility to prevent state interference in the labor market. In contrast, disability insurance argues predominantly within the market and the industrial convention to “sell” its clientele in the context of employer campaigns and case-related interactions with employers. Only recently, both sides started to reframe the employment of disabled people as a win–win affair, which would reconcile economic self-interest and the common good.

Employer-provided benefits are a large and growing share of compensation costs. In this paper, I consider three factors that can affect the value created by employer-sponsored benefits. First, firms have a comparative advantage (e.g., due to scale economies or tax treatment) in purchasing relative to employees. This advantage can vary across firms based on size and other differences in cost structure. Second, employees differ in their valuations of benefits and it is costly for workers to match with firms that offer the benefits they value. Finally, some benefits can reduce the marginal cost to an employee of extra working time. I develop a simple model that integrates these factors. I then generate empirical implications of the model and use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to test these implications. I examine access to employer-provided meals, child care, dental insurance, and health insurance. I also study how benefits are grouped together and differences between benefits packages at for-profit, not-for-profit, and government employers. The empirical analysis provides evidence consistent with all three factors in the model contributing to firms’ decisions about which benefits to offer.

In the spirit of Polachek (1975) and the later work of Becker (1985) on the role of specialization within the family, we examine the relationship between fringe benefits and the division of labor within a married household. The provision of fringe benefits is complicated by their non-additive nature within the household, as well as IRS regulations that stipulate that they be offered in a non-discriminatory manner in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. We model family decisions within a framework in which one spouse specializes in childcare and as a result experiences a reduction in market productive capacity. Our model predicts that the forces toward specialization become stronger as the number of children increase, so that the spouse specializing in childcare will have some combination of lower wages, hours worked, and fringe benefits. We demonstrate that to the extent that labor markets are incomplete, the family is less likely to obtain health insurance from the employer of the spouse that specializes in childcare. Using data from the April 1993 CPS we find evidence consistent with our model.

This chapter focuses on the Trump administration's health policies, with an emphasis on its efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It assesses those policies both in the context of the administration's broader goals and motivations, and in the context of systemic deficits and deficiencies in American health policy. I argue that failures of health policy and health security in the face of the pandemic reflect those longstanding weaknesses, much more so than the administration's actions (or inaction).