HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM, OLDER WORKERS, AND RETIREMENT

这项拟议的研究的目标是模拟 针对老年工人和退休人员的替代医疗保险改革 在他们有资格享受医疗保险之前。我计划估计一下 不同的改革将影响工人的退休决定， 公司的雇佣和薪酬决定，以及程度 医保前人群的医疗保险覆盖率。 更具体地说，该项目有四个目标： 1)确定雇主如何提供医疗保险以 退休人员会影响退休决定，将这种影响与 社会保障和公司养老金计划，并评估 年保险覆盖面与个人健康状况的相互作用 决定退休。 2)评估补贴价格的政策的效果 老年工人的医疗保险范围和 提前退休的人。 3)确定强制雇主规定的 关于老年人就业和补偿的医疗保险 工人，他们的保险费用比年轻的同行更高。 4)使用这些发现来模拟不同保险的效果 关于退休决定和老年工人福利的改革 以及提前退休的人。 尽管下面描述的分析将集中在有限的 改革建议的数量，我建立的框架将是 概括到足以包含对大多数未来影响的分析 改革。我将使用各种数据源，包括大多数 为年长员工和早期员工收集的全面数据集 退休人员。我的分析的一个关键特点是使用了 利用变异的“实验”识别策略 从现有的政策差异分析未来的政策变化， 使我能够绕过过去的研究人员在 隔离利益经济变量的因果影响。

The goal of the proposed research is to model the effect of alternative health insurance reforms on older workers and retirees before they become eligible for Medicare. I plan to estimate how different reforms will affect the retirement decisions of workers, the employment and compensation decisions of firms, and the extent of health insurance coverage among the pre-Medicare population. More specifically, the project has four aims: 1) To determine how employer provision of health insurance to retirees affects retirement decisions, to compare this effect to those of social security and firm pension plans, and to assess the interaction of insurance coverage with individual health status in determining retirement. 2) To estimate the effect of policies which subsidize the price of health insurance on the extent of coverage of older workers and early retirees. 3) To determine the effects of mandated employer provision of health insurance on the employment and compensation of older workers, who cost more than their younger counterparts to insure. 4) To use these findings to model the effect of different insurance reforms on retirement decisions and the well being of older workers and early retirees. Although the analysis described below will focus on a limited number of reform proposals, the framework which I establish will be general enough to encompass analysis of the effects of most future reforms. I will use a variety of data sources, including the most comprehensive data set ever collected for older workers and early retirees. A key feature of my analysis will be the use of "natural experiment" identification strategies, which exploit the variation from existing policy differences to analyze future policy changes, allowing me to circumvent the problems of past researchers in isolating the causal effects of the economic variables of interest.