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Impact of the ACA’s Dependent Coverage Mandate on Health Insurance and Labor Market Outcomes Among Young Adults: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity Design

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Abstract

This paper identifies the effect of the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate on health insurance coverage and labor market outcomes among young adults by exploiting the discrete change in health insurance coverage at age 26. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that aging out from the ACA’s dependent coverage mandate is associated with up to a 4.2-percentage-point decrease in private insurance coverage at age 26. We also find that aging out from the mandate is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of being employed. However, we do not find any significant changes in hourly wage, weekly working hours or job mobility at age 26.

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Fig. 1

Source: MEPS Panel 15–18 (2010–2014)

Fig. 2

Source: MEPS Panel 15–18 (2010–2014)

Fig. 3

Source: MEPS Panel 15–18 (2010–2014)

Fig. 4

Source: MEPS Panel 15–18 (2010–2014)

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Notes

  1. In our RD parametric estimation, we mainly rely on estimation results from sample with age bandwidths of 24 months. But we report our results of 12, 36, 48 months in “Appendix.”

  2. Since the exact date of birth is not available in MEPS-HC, we cannot calculate exact days of each respondent before and after 26th birthday.

  3. All job-specific variables refer to a person’s current main job. The current main job, defined by the respondent, indicates the main source of employment.

  4. All job-specific variables refer to a person’s current main job. The current main job, defined by the respondent, indicates the main source of employment. A current main job was defined for persons who either reported that they were currently employed and identified a current main job or who reported and identified a job to return to. Therefore, job-specific information such as hourly wage exists for persons not presently working at the interview date but who have a job to return to as of the interview date.

  5. Due to confidentiality concerns, hourly wages greater than or equal to $78.00 were top-coded to $78.00.

  6. Not rely on, however, we still present the estimators from models with cubic polynomials in “Appendix”.

  7. Although not reported here, we also include cubic polynomials of forcing variable fully interacted with the dummy variable for parametric models, and nonparametric models under rectangular and triangular kernels as robustness checks. See Table 7 in Appendix for detailed results.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants in the special session at Eastern Economic Association 44th Annual Conference at Boston, MA, and three anonymous referees for their valuable and helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University at Albany, SUNY, 1400 Washington Ave, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    Barış K. Yörük & Linna Xu

  2. CESifo, Munich, Germany

    Barış K. Yörük

Authors
  1. Barış K. Yörük
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  2. Linna Xu
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Correspondence to Linna Xu.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 The effects of aging out of ACA on health insurance coverage: parametric and nonparametric models
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Table 8 The effects of aging out of ACA on labor market outcomes: parametric and nonparametric models
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Yörük, B.K., Xu, L. Impact of the ACA’s Dependent Coverage Mandate on Health Insurance and Labor Market Outcomes Among Young Adults: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity Design. Eastern Econ J 45, 58–86 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-018-0123-8

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