Union Effects on Health Insurance Provision and Coverage in the United States

During the past two decades, union density has declined in the United States and employer provision of health benefits has undergone substantial changes in extent and form. Using individual data spanning the years 1983-1997, combined with establishment data for 1993, we update and extend previous analyses of private-sector union effects on employer-provided health benefits. We find that the union effect on health insurance coverage rates has fallen somewhat but remains large, due to an increase over time in the union effect on employee 'take-up' of offered insurance, and that declining unionization explains 20-35 percent of the decline in employee health coverage. The increasing union take-up effect is linked to union effects on employees' direct costs for health insurance and the availability of retiree coverage.

Unions and Managerial Pay

Unions compress the wage distribution among workers covered by union contracts. We ask whether unions also have an effect on the managers of unionized firms. To this end we collected and assembled data on unionization and managerial pay within firms and industries in the U.S. and across countries. Generally, we find a negative correlation between executive compensation and unionization in our cross-section data, but no relationship of changes in unionization on the growth of compensation of executives over time. Using NLRB elections data, we find that a loss of union members due to decertification elections is associated with higher CEO pay, although our estimates are imprecise. With CPS data we consistently find that where unions are stronger, fewer managers are employed

The Effect of an Employer Health Insurance Mandate on Health Insurance Coverage and the Demand for Labor: Evidence from Hawaii

Over the past few decades, policy makers have considered employer mandates as a strategy for stemming the tide of declining health insurance coverage. In this paper we examine the long term effects of the only employer health insurance mandate that has ever been enforced in the United States, Hawaii's Prepaid Health Care Act, using a standard supply-demand framework and Current Population Survey data covering the years 1979 to 2005. During this period, the coverage gap between Hawaii and other states increased, as did real health insurance costs, implying a rising burden of the mandate on Hawaii's employers. We use a variant of the traditional permutation (placebo) test across all states to examine the magnitude and statistical properties of these growing coverage differences and their impacts on labor market outcomes, conditional on an extensive set of covariates. As expected, the coverage gap is larger for workers who tend to have low rates of coverage in the voluntary market (primarily those with lower skills). We also find that relative wages fell in Hawaii over time, but the estimates are statistically insignificant. By contrast, a parallel analysis of workers employed fewer than 20 hours per week indicates that the law significantly increased employers' reliance on such workers in order to reduce the burden of the mandate. We find no evidence suggesting that the law reduced employment probabilities.health insurance, employment, hours, wages