Who Pays for Public Employee Health Costs?

No 19574, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We analyze the incidence of public-employee health benefits. Because these benefits are negotiated through the political process, relevant labor market institutions deviate significantly from the competitive, private-sector benchmark. Empirically, we find that roughly 15 percent of the cost of recent benefit growth was passed onto school district employees through reductions in wages and salaries. Strong teachers' unions were associated with relatively strong linkages between benefit growth and growth in total compensation. We further find that when economic conditions are poor, straining public budgets, benefit growth is more readily shifted back to public employees. Our analysis is consistent with the view that the costs of public workers' benefits are difficult to monitor, contributing to benefit oriented, and often under-funded, compensation schemes.

JEL-codes: H22 H74 H75 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-nps
Note: AG ED EH LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Who Pays for Public Employee Health Costs? , Jeffrey Clemens, David M. Cutler. in State and Local Health Plans for Active and Retired Public Employees , Clark and Newhouse. 2014
Published as Clemens, Jeffrey & Cutler, David M., 2014. "Who pays for public employee health costs?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 65-76.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19574.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Who pays for public employee health costs? (2014)
Chapter: Who Pays for Public Employee Health Costs? (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19574

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19574

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().