We study over 20 million emergency room (ER) discharges in Massachusetts and three comparison states to estimate the impact of Massachusetts health care reform on claims for Workers' Compensation (WC). Prior evidence on the relationship between health insurance and WC claiming behavior is mixed....

Despite a recent dramatic increase in the rate of employer accommodation of injured workers, the extant literature provides little evidence on the determinants of accommodation or the reasons for this upward trend. In this study, the authors take a comprehensive approach to estimating the...

The costs of public insurance expansions are ordinarily justified by the claim that increased eligibility causes gains in insurance coverage, which translate into improved health care and health. This paper studies dramatic changes in public health insurance eligibility for immigrant and native...

Over the past decade, researchers have focused attention on a new approach for encouraging Americans to adopt beneficial behaviors. This approach relies on making the desired behavior occur automatically unless an individual chooses to opt out. A prominent example is automatic enrollment in...

An important question to ask regarding social insurance programs such as workers' compensation (WC) is to what extent do higher benefits lead to more claims? The authors of this study revisit incentive effects of WC, using 25 years of data (1977?2004) from the March Current Population Survey...

Recent evidence suggests that the default options implicit in economic choices (e.g., 401(k) savings by white-collar workers) have extraordinarily large effects on decision-making. This study presents a field experiment that evaluates the effect of defaults on savings among a highly...