9409250 Kimmel This is a Research Opportunities for Women Planning Grant. The project will focus on health-related employment barriers, including the relationships between maternal and child health status, health insurance coverage, and employment behavior. The project will conduct policy simulations that will include the examination of potential work-disincentives of publicly-provided health insurance coverage and the extent to which mandated employer coverage might be expected to reduce such disincentives. The motivation for this particular focus is the impact poor health and the unavailability of employer-provided health coverage for mothers could have on the probability of their labor force participation. The research during the planning period will focus on each component of the health issue separately, producing separate estimates of the effects of health status on employment; the effect of the probability of receiving employer-provided health insurance coverage on employment behavior; and the effect of receiving the coverage weighted by the family's valuation of that coverage on employment behavior. This research will incorporate data from overlapping waves of the 1987 and 1988 panels of the SIPP (Survey of Income and Program Participation), and the 1987 NMES (National Medical Expenditures Survey). During the post-planning period, these results will be used to build a more comprehensive model of the linkages between health care utilization for the mother and her children, the availability of public and private health insurance coverage, and maternal employment behavior. This will provide evidence of the impact of public and private health insurance coverage probabilities, and the value of this coverage, on the mother's employment choices. For this full model, the underlying theoretical model will merge the separate literatures concerning the demand for health insurance, the effect of health problems on employment, and the welfare/work-disinc entives literature. Such a full model of employment barriers will be quite complex, and implementation will require addressing serious theoretical and econometric concerns.
