title: Premium copayments and the trade-off between wages and employer-provided health insurance.
abstract: This paper estimates the trade-off between salary and health insurance costs using data on Illinois school teachers between 1991 and 2008 that allow us to address several common empirical challenges in this literature. Teachers paid about 17 percent of the cost of individual health insurance and about 46 percent of the cost of their family members' plans through premium contributions, but we find no evidence that teachers' salaries respond to changes in insurance costs. Consistent with a higher willingness to pay for insurance, we find that premium contributions are higher in districts that employ a higher-tenured workforce. We find no evidence that school districts respond to higher health insurance costs by reducing the number of teachers.
authors.affiliation: University of Illinois at Chicago, United States; NBER, United States. Electronic address: lubotsky@uic.edu.
authors.forename: Darren
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lubotsky
authors.affiliation: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States. Electronic address: caolson@illinois.edu.
authors.forename: Craig A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Olson
mesh_terms: D017047:Cost Sharing / Q000191:economics / Q000639:trends; D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D004522:Educational Status; D006264:Health Benefit Plans, Employee / Q000191:economics* / Q000639:trends; D005102:Health Expenditures / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D007087:Illinois; D007588:Job Satisfaction; D017150:Public Sector / Q000191:economics; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012456:Salaries and Fringe Benefits / Q000191:economics* / Q000639:trends; D000070777:School Teachers / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D000078329:Workforce
keywords: Compensating wage differences; Employer-provided health insurance; Premium contributions; Public school teachers