Public health insurance of children and parental labor market outcomes

This paper exploits variation resulting from a series of federal and state Medicaid expansions between 1979 and 2014 to estimate the effects of child's access to public health insurance on labor market outcomes of parents. The results imply that extended Medicaid eligibility of children leads to positive contemporaneous labor supply responses of both parents. The estimated effects are concentrated among mothers with non-white children and fathers with white children.