ERIU Funded Research Projects

Author: Christian, Michael S.
Working Paper: The Distribution of Medicaid and Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Coverage Among Immigrants Before and After the 1996 Welfare Reform (PDF) ; August 2004

Abstract:
This paper replicates and extends an analysis by George Borjas reported in ERIU Working Paper 16, “Welfare Reform, Labor Supply, and Health Insurance in the Immigrant Population.” It examines the extent to which Borjas’ findings about the effects of welfare reform on non-citizen immigrants apply across important immigrant subgroups. The findings confirm that most non-citizen immigrants who lost Medicaid following welfare reform gained employment-sponsored coverage. However Medicaid coverage losses were not offset by employment-based coverage gains for female-headed households with children, a major subpopulation affected by welfare reform.

Author: Kuttner, Hanns ; Baughman, Reagan ; Christian, Michael S. ; Mortensen, Karoline
Working Paper: Employment and Health Insurance: Views from Five Surveys (PDF) ; September 2004

Abstract:
Five national surveys offer similar accounts of employment-based health insurance and the subset of the uninsured who have declined employment-based health insurance. While offering similar stories, the surveys are far from identical in the number of people they place at each turn in the story, with the relative size of the difference tending to grow as the subset becomes smaller. In disentangling sources of disagreement, we find no survey has an absolute advantage. The advantages are comparative. Thus we see nothing in the differences across the surveys that is likely to disturb the current equilibrium of economists who look at health insurance relying on the Current Population Survey and health services researchers the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Nonetheless, this equilibrium leaves unused some of the information that can be had from other surveys, and we close with some of that information.