Health Insurance and Household Search

Matthew Dey, New York University
Christopher Flinn, New York University

While some have questioned whether the health insurance status of the spouse can be regarded as exogenous, no modeling framework has been developed that would allow the simultaneity in health insurance and wage statuses of spouses to be rigorously investigated. In this research we will develop an estimable household search model that will provide estimates of both purely descriptive and completely behavioral stochastic process models, characterizing the dynamic movements across wage and health insurance coverage states of the two spouses. Using the estimates from the behavioral model, researchers will be able to consistently estimate meaningful measures of "job lock" and "job push."