the retirement behaviour of the self employed in britain we analyze the retirement behaviour of older self employed workers using a life cycle framework and a multinomial logit model of dynamic employment and retirement choices using data from the two wave retirement survey we find that greater actual or potential earnings decrease the probability of retirement among the self employed in contrast to employees none of gender health or family circumstances appear to affect self employed retirement decisions the dynamic analysis reveals that relatively few employees and virtually no retirees switch into self employment in later life the switches that do occur are motivated less by attempts to use self employment as a bridge job or stepping stone to full retirement than by self employment being a last resort for less affluent workers with job histories of weak attachment to the labour market we compare self employed and employee retirement behaviour and discuss the policy implications of our results

dynamics of health and labor market risks while there is little doubt that the probability of poor health increases with age and that less healthy people face a more difficult situation on the labor market the precise relationship between facing the risks of health deterioration and labor market instability is not well understood using 12 years of data from the german socio economic panel we study the nature of the relationship between poor health and non employment on a sample of german men aged 30 59 we propose a joint model of health and labor market risks which identifies the mechanism through which poor health contributes to the probability of being jobless and vice versa we find an important role of unobserved heterogeneity and evidence for correlation in the unobservable characteristics determining the two processes the results also show strong persistence in the dynamics of health and labor market risks

disability and self employment evidence for the uk this article examines the self employment decision for disabled and nondisabled workers in the uk using labour force survey lfs data it is found that self employment may provide an important means by which those with work limiting disabilities can accommodate their impairment

ski lift pricing with applications to labor and other markets reply after we wrote our paper on pricing at ski areas barro and romer 1987 we received several comments like that of tyler cowen and amihai glazer 1991 noting that our results could be interpreted as special cases of results that have been established in club theory we also received comments claiming that our results were clearly wrong because they contradicted standard results in club theory we now sympathize with the economist who was reportedly told by a critic that your result is trivial wrong and i already proved it when we wrote our paper we were aware that ski areas were sometimes mentioned as examples of club goods see for example the paper by suzanne scotchmer 1985 we did not pursue the literature on clubs because our problem contained no club goods the goods we dealt with rides up a chair lift are conventional private goods our result also contradicted the one result from club theory that we knew the standard club analysis of a ski area treats it as a shared facility each member in the club decides how intensively to use this facility in this setting eitan berglas 1976 first showed that both a membership fee and a usage fee are necessary to support an efficient allocation our finding was that queues with no usage fee support an efficient allocation nevertheless cowen and glazer are correct that our results have much in common with results from club theory specifically our results can be interpreted as special cases of results for clubs that are not subject to variable intensity of usage there are therefore two interesting questions why does the analysis of a problem with private goods resemble the analysis of a problem with club goods and why does our problem resemble a club problem in which people cannot vary how often they use the shared facilities the answer to both of these questions depends on the observation that it is possible to treat a bundle of private goods as a

do increased premium subsidies affect how much health insurance is purchased evidence from the self employed abstract this paper estimates the effect of recent federal and state level increases in the deductibility of health insurance premiums for self employed individuals which reduced the after tax price of health insurance on both the take up of coverage and the amount of insurance purchased using a panel of tax returns filed by self employed taxpayers from 1999 to 2004 we estimate a take up elasticity of 0 316 overall with significantly higher elasticities for single taxpayers on the intensive margin we find an elasticity of 0 733 overall

the economics of child labor if child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents concern for the household s survival the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force however this assumption about parental decision making coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work the paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications copyright 1998 by american economic association

public health insurance individual health and entry into self employment we investigate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into self employment health insurance systems that distinguish between the two sectors of employment create incentives or disincentives to start a business for different individuals we estimate a discrete time hazard rate model of entry into self employment based on representative household panel data for germany which include individual health information the results indicate that an increase in the health insurance cost differential between self employed workers and paid employees by 10 per month decreases the probability of entry into self employment by 1 7 of the annual entry rate this shows that entrepreneurship lock which an emerging literature describes for the system of employer provided health insurance in the usa can also occur in a public health insurance system therefore entrepreneurial activity should be taken into account when discussing potential health care reforms

ski lift pricing with applications to labor and other markets the market for ski runs or amusement rides often features admission tickets with no explicit price per ride therefore the equilibrium i nvolves queues which are systematically longer during peak periods s uch as weekends moreover the prices of admission tickets are much l ess responsive than the length of queues to variations in demand eve n when these variations are predictable despite the queues and stick y prices the authors show that the outcomes are nearly efficient und er plausible conditions they then show that similar results obtain f or some familiar congestion problems and for profit sharing schemes i n the labor market copyright 1987 by american economic association

education choices in mexico using a structural model and a randomized experiment to evaluate progresa in this paper we evaluate the effect of a large welfare program in rural mexico for such a purpose we use an evaluation sample that includes a number of villages where the program was not implemented for evaluation purposes we estimate a structural model of education choices and argue that without such a framework it is impossible to evaluate the effect of the program and especially possible changes to its structure we also argue that the randomized component of the data allows us to identify a more flexible model that is better suited to evaluate the program we find that the program has a positive effect on the enrollment of children especially after primary school we also find that an approximately revenue neutral change in the program that would increase the grant for secondary school children while eliminating for the primary school children would have a substantially larger effect on enrollment of the latter while having minor effects on the former

tax incentives and the decision to purchase health insurance evidence from the self employed the tax reform act of 1986 introduced a new tax subsidy for health insurance purchases by the self employed we analyze the changing patterns of insurance demand before and after tax reform to generate new estimates of how the after tax price of insurance affects the discrete choice of whether to buy insurance we employ both traditional regression models and difference in difference methods that compare changes in insurance coverage across groups around tra86 the results from our most carefully controlled comparison suggest that a 1 percent increase in the cost of insurance coverage reduces the probability that a self employed single person will be insured by 1 8 percentage points

when is efficiency separable from distribution in the provision of club goods abstract using the homogeneous of degree zero inverse congestion quality function employed most frequently in the literature we characterise completely the families of utility functions which are then necessary and sufficient for break even utilitarian welfare maximising provision of club goods with self selection to be separable from distribution two types of separation involving alternatively a the price and quality b the price quality facility size and total utilisation are considered when separation is possible utility functions and optimal decisions take simple intuitive forms our results extend the scope of separation results previously obtained only for pure public goods journal of economic literature classification numbers d62 h23 h40

clubs local public goods and transportation models a synthesis abstract clubs local public goods and transportation models are analyzed within a unified model the emphasis is on the derivation of optimal allocation pricing and the size of the sharing group we derive the conditions under which optimal prices will yield surplus or deficit as well as those under which competitive provision will be efficient given heterogeneous tastes we prove that segregation according to tastes is generally efficient although several cases where this result does not hold are also discussed we show that the existing literature is unnecessarily restrictive and that the unified approach suggested here considerably extends the existing analysis of clubs local public goods and the transportation problems

the impact of increased tax subsidies on the insurance coverage of self employed families evidence from the 1996 2004 medical expenditure panel survey the share of health insurance premiums that self employed workers can deduct when computing federal income taxes rose from 30 percent in 1996 to 100 percent in 2003 data from the 1996 2004 medical expenditure panel survey are used to show that the increased tax subsidy was associated with substantial increases in private coverage among self employed workers and their spouses estimated effects on public coverage and the coverage of children were smaller in magnitude and less precisely estimated simulation results show that much of the post 1996 subsidy increase represented an inframarginal transfer to persons who would have had held private insurance anyway nevertheless increased subsidization expanded private coverage by 1 1 to 1 7 million persons at a cost per newly insured person less than 2 300 in all simulations a cost below that found in simulations of more broadly based subsidies

does price framing affect the consumer price sensitivity of health plan choice this paper provides field evidence on how price framing affects consumers decision to switch health plans in 2009 german federal regulation required insurers to express premium differences between standardized health plans in absolute euro values relative to a federal reference price rather than in percentage point payroll tax differences representative individual level panel data and aggregated health plan level panel data on the universe of health plans show that the reform strongly increased enrollees willingness to switch plans with demand elasticities increasing fourfold the salience of premium differences and the default premium are obviously key driving forces in the decision to switch insurers

school subsidies for the poor evaluating the mexican progresa poverty program abstract this paper evaluates how the progresa program which provides poor mothers in rural mexico with education grants has affected enrollment poor children who reside in communities randomly selected to participate in the initial phase of the progresa are compared to those who reside in other control communities pre program comparisons check the randomized design and double difference estimators of the program s effect on the treated are calculated by grade and sex probit models are also estimated for the probability that a child is enrolled controlling for additional characteristics of the child their parents local schools and community and for sample attrition to evaluate the sensitivity of the program estimates these estimates of program short run effects on enrollment are extrapolated to the lifetime schooling and the earnings of adults to approximate the internal rate of return on the public schooling subsidies as they increase expected private wages

the impact of employer provided health insurance on dynamic employment transitions we estimate the impact of employer provided health insurance ephi on the job mobility of males over time using a dynamic empirical model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity previous studies of job lock reach different conclusions about possible distortions in labor mobility stemming from an employment based health insurance system a few authors find no evidence of job lock although most find reductions in the mobility of insured workers of between 20 and 40 percent we use data from the national longitudinal survey of youth which includes variables describing the health insurance an individual holds as well as whether he is offered insurance by his employer this additional information allows us to model the latent individual characteristics that are correlated with the offer of ephi the acceptance of ephi and employment transitions our results provide an estimate of job lock unbiased through correlation with positive job characteristics and individual specific turnover propensity we find no evidence of job lock among married males and produce small estimates of job lock among unmarried males of between 10 and 15 percent

two tier pricing of shared facilities in a free entry equilibrium we explore how well the market will provide shared facilities which are subject to congestion it is usually efficient to have multiple facilities because it is more efficient to spend resources on facilities than to endure crowding costs we assume firms can charge a membership price and a visit price we present a symmetric nash equilibrium in these two prices we show that ifthe number offirms is large the membership price will be small thus the membership price is a measure of market power when entry occurs in response to positive profit but such that entry is deterred by the prospect of negative profit in a symmetric nash equilibrium the endogenous number offirms is bounded below by one fewer than the efficient number thefees paid by a client converge to an appropriately defined competitive price as the economy is replicated

employment based health insurance and job mobility is there evidence of job lock the majority of privately insured americans obtain their health insurance through their own or a family member s employment the rationale for employers to provide health insurance is straightforward by pooling the risks of individuals employers can reduce adverse selection and lower administrative expenses in addition they benefit from tax laws allowing businesses to deduct their health insurance costs these advantages of employer provision however must be weighed against the distortions they may generate in individual labor market decisions in particular health insurance may distort job mobility if employees decide to keep jobs they would rather leave for fear of losing coverage for preexisting conditions a possibility that has been termed job lock this paper attempts to quantify the effect of employer provided health insurance on the labor market mobility of individuals the link between employer provided health insurance and

mechanism experiments and policy evaluations randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies how can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes we argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify the behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions what we call mechanism experiments these types of experiments can be of great policy value even if the intervention that is tested or its setting does not correspond exactly to any realistic policy option

health status and health dynamics in an empirical model of expected longevity expected longevity is an important factor influencing older individuals decisions such as consumption savings purchase of life insurance and annuities claiming of social security benefits and labor supply it has also been shown to be a good predictor of actual longevity which in turn is highly correlated with health status a relatively new literature on health investments under uncertainty which builds upon the seminal work by grossman grossman m 1972 on the concept of health capital and demand for health journal of political economy 80 223 255 has directly linked longevity with characteristics behaviors and decisions by utility maximizing agents our empirical model can be understood within that theoretical framework as estimating a production function of longevity using longitudinal data from the health and retirement study we directly incorporate health dynamics in explaining the variation in expected longevities and compare two alternative measures of health dynamics the self reported health change and the computed health change based on self reports of health status in 38 of the reports in our sample computed health changes are inconsistent with the direct report on health changes over time and another 15 of the sample can suffer from information losses if computed changes are used to assess changes in actual health these potentially serious problems raise doubts regarding the use and interpretation of the computed health changes and even the lagged measures of self reported health as controls for health dynamics in a variety of empirical settings our empirical results controlling for both subjective and objective measures of health status and unobserved heterogeneity in reporting suggest that self reported health changes are a preferred measure of health dynamics

does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy conducted between 1995 and 1996 in bangladesh the study observed that the subsidy increases schooling but its effect on child labour is ambiguous the subsidy increased schooling by far more than it reduced child labour substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy the reduction in the incidence of child labour by boys girls represents about one quarter eighth of the increase in their school enrollment rate

the effect of self employed health insurance subsidies on self employment abstract this paper estimates the effect of an increase in the deductibility of health insurance premiums for self employed individuals on the probability of being self employed using a panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2004 we estimate fixed effects instrumental variable regressions for the probability of being self employed entering into self employment and exiting from self employment our results suggest that this policy increased the probability of being self employed by 1 5 percentage points and increased the probability that a taxpayer would be primarily or exclusively self employed by 1 1 and 0 35 percentage points respectively these effects explain about a third to a half of the total increase in self employment by these definitions over the sample period we also find that the probability of entering self employment increased by 0 8 percentage points and find suggestive evidence that the probability of exit decreased by 2 8 percentage points

cash or condition evidence from a cash transfer experiment this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled cash or condition evidence from a cash transfer experiment conducted from 2008 to the end of 2009 in malawi the study observed the impact of conditionality in cash transfer programs with two distinct interventions unconditional transfers uct arm and transfers conditional on school attendance cct arm targeted at adolescent girls in malawi on individual level dropout rates declined in both treatment arms however the uct arm is 43 percent as large as the cct arm the fraction of days attended in the cct arm is significantly higher than the uct cognitive ability math and english scores significantly improve for the cct but not for the uct probability of pregnancy and marriage were much lower in the uct arm the delays in marriage and fertility in the uct arm are found entirely among adolescent girls who dropped out of school after the start of the intervention improvements in human capital for the recipients of the cct are achieved at the cost of worse outcomes for people who drop out of school funding for the study derived from the global development network bill and melinda gates foundation national bureau of economic research nber africa project world bank research support budget grant world bank knowledge for change trust fund world development report 2007 small grants fund spanish impact evaluation fund and gender action plan trust fund

private and public health insurance in the uk abstract this paper investigates the interaction between state health provision and private medical insurance in the uk regional data on private insurance and national health service waiting lists are used to assess whether higher levels of private insurance can affect performance of the public health sector

teenage school attendance and cash transfers an impact evaluation of panes proquest denotes formulae omitted three years after a severe economic crisis the uruguayan government launched a temporary antipoverty plan the national plan for social emergency assistance panes which took place from april 2005 to december 2007 lasting for thirty four months this program included a cash transfer component citizen income which was in fact the main intervention of the plan in the short run the primary objective of this intervention was to provide cash assistance to indigent households in the long run it aimed at promoting social integration in many ways such as carrying out educational and labor interventions for adults encouraging households to foster child schooling and promoting health checks to pursue this objective in the original design program participation was conditional on school enrollment for those households with children and health checks for all beneficiaries however in practice conditionalities were not controlled owing to lack of administrative coordination among the involved institutions although promoting schooling was not the main objective of the plan the cash transfer might have affected school attendance and child labor through a direct income effect and also through the influence of the announced conditionalities the provision of conditional cash transfers as a means to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty has entailed a redesign of latin american social protection systems over the past two decades the abundant literature on impact evaluations of conditional cash transfers indicates that many programs have successfully increased child schooling particularly in the age group six to thirteen and in some cases have reduced child labor with no major undesirable effects on adult labor supply eclac 2006 fiszbein and schady 2009 bouillon and tejerina 2007 saavedra and garcia 2012 yet the design and implementation of these programs varies a great deal across different instances and baseline situations also differ across countries according to the existing literature baseline enrollment rates design issues such as payments scheme and timing type of conditionalities complementary supplyside interventions and the generosity of the transfer are strongly associated with the magnitude of the effects on schooling fiszbein and schady 2009 bouillon and tejerina 2007 saavedra and garcia 2012 this paper seeks to contribute to the accumulating literature about the impacts of cash transfers on teenage schooling and labor by providing evidence from a middle income country in which the initial enrollment rates were above the average of the countries where these programs have been previously launched we analyze program effects on school attendance and child labor for children aged fourteen to seventeen this group concentrates the main problems of the uruguayan educational system as it exhibits persistently high drop out rates owing to this circumstance it is important to find out to what extent cash transfers can contribute to overcome this problem we also explore the role of some of the potential channels highlighted in the cash transfer literature household income adult labor supply and labor income and conditionalities this evaluation is based on two data sets the official administrative records from panes applicants baseline data and two waves of a follow up survey that was specifically designed to carry out the impact evaluation of the program the first gathered eighteen months after the program started and the second two months after the program ended we provide evidence using two identification strategies a regression discontinuity design rdd using separately the data from each wave of the evaluation survey and a difference in differences dd approach that exploits the longitudinal nature of the collected data the questionnaire from the first wave of the follow up survey allows us to partially explore the role of conditionalities

does health reform affect self employment evidence from massachusetts this paper evaluates whether the implementation of the 2006 massachusetts health reform law affected the decision of taxpayers to be self employed using both difference in differences and synthetic control methods on a panel of tax returns that spans 1999 2010 though tenuous our results suggest that the reform led to a decline in the rate of taxpayers earning a majority of income from self employment in addition it appears to have had a positive impact on earning some self employment income among joint filers and earning the majority of income from self employment among older taxpayers but these were offset by negative impacts on single filers and taxpayers age 35 49