Workers' Compensation Costs When Maximum Benefits Change.

"Natural experiment" studies of benefit utilization in workers' compensation have used changes in statutory maximum payments to estimate claim duration elasticities. These studies so far have been limited to using insurance claims data rather than information on individual workers. The result is a failure to estimate changes in claim frequency or the average costs per worker as maximums change. This is the first natural experiment study to analyze changes in both the frequency and severity of workers' compensation claims using data from a single large U.S. employer. In addition, the utilization response to benefit decreases as well as benefit increases is examined. Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers