Nonportable fringe benefits, such as health insurance and retirement benefits, can influence an individual's career decisions and financial well-being. To protect employee's utility, state and federal governments enacted policies that regulated these benefits. The first two chapters of my dissertation study two such policies: tax credits for private health insurance coverage and dependent coverage mandates that allowed young adults to be covered through their parents' insurance. I examine the effects of these policies on several health and labor market outcomes. In the last chapter, my coauthor and I explore a slightly different perspective on fringe benefits. We examine to what extent lifetime earnings could explain the variation in wealth at retirement. By researching these topics, I contribute to the understanding of how fringe benefits and lifetime earnings affected outcomes of rational decision-making: health insurance take-up, job mobility and wealth accumulation.In chapter 1, I investigate the effectiveness of tax credits on health insurance premiums. There was a renewed interest in using tax credits to increase health insurance coverage after the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Health Insurance Tax Credit (HITC) was implemented between 1991--1993 to reduce the burden of health insurance premiums primarily for low-income families. Although it was active for three years, this policy has been studied in only one previous study. In this chapter, I examine the effectiveness of the HITC by using the Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP), and I provide the first estimates of its effects on healthcare utilization and self-reported health status. My results align with previous studies and suggest the HITC increased the health insurance take-up by 5.8 percentage points. The implementation of the HITC also significantly improved the self-reported health status of respondents.In the second chapter, I analyze the effects of dependent coverage mandates on working fathers' job mobility and compensation. Due to the low rates of health insurance coverage among young adults, some state governments began mandating health insurance companies to allow adult children to stay on their parents' health insurance plans. First implemented in 1995, these mandates aimed to increase health coverage among young adults. In 2010, the federal government enacted a more comprehensive version of the dependent coverage mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act. These state- and federal-level efforts successfully increased insurance rates for young adults, but they might have also come with unintended consequences for parents. Parents who placed a high value on health insurance for their young adult children might be reluctant to leave jobs with employer-provided health insurance, and employers might offset the mandated-incurred health care costs by reducing other types of employee benefits or earnings. To assess the extent of such consequences, I study the effects of both the state and federal dependent health insurance mandates on fathers. By analyzing the 2004 and 2008 SIPP panels, which are linked with Detailed Earnings Records and Business Registrar data from the United States Census, I examine the mandates' effects on fathers' voluntary job separation rates (job-lock and job-push) and changes in their compensation. After the implementation of the mandates, I observe a significant decrease in the likelihood of voluntary job separation among eligible working fathers aged 45--64 with employer-provided health insurance. Additionally for these fathers, except for those who separated from these jobs within the current wave, my analysis slightly evidences that the mandates reduced the total monetary compensation. In the last chapter, we investigate the impact of lifetime earnings on retirement wealth. Historically, many households accumulated substantial wealth by retirement, while many other households accumulated very little. Venti and Wise (1999, 2001) directly examine this question by utilizing data that was superior to that available to previous researchers and conclude that th03000300e bulk of the dispersion must be attributed to differences in the amount that households choose to save.'' In this paper, we examine the extent that a remaining problem in their data affected their results: Their measure of lifetime earnings, despite being based on administrative data, was subject to topcoding in each year. Using the 2001 SIPP that was not subject to the same problem, we find that the effect of the topcoding was substantial. At least 35 percent of individuals were misclassified in each of the top four deciles. When replicating a key result of Venti and Wise (2001), our findings suggest that the correlation between lifetime earnings and savings was about 50\\% greater than what was found when using censored deciles. This increased explanatory power came largely at the expense of the other variables in the regression model.
Read
