The
Impact of Pre-existing Health
Conditions on Job Mobility: A Measure of Job Lock
Kanika Kapur
Abstract
This paper uses the National Medical Expenditure Survey
of 1987 to measure the importance of job lock as a deterrent to
job mobility. I begin by using a simple difference-in-difference
technique to estimate the differential effect of family sickness
on the job mobility of individuals with and without employer-provided
health insurance. I then amend my technique to take account of the
possible bias of the difference-in-difference estimator when the
control and experimental groups are dissimilar. In the empirical
work in the paper, the coefficient on the job lock term is always
insignificant. Using a medical expenses index that combines all
the family sickness measures, I find that job lock accounts for
a 0.33% increase in job mobility. Moreover, the confidence interval
of this estimate excludes large levels of job lock. I then reanalyze
previous work which uses the same data source and finds large and
significant job lock. I find that after controlling for omitted
variables, using better data to create the job lock measures, and
constructing comparable control and experimental groups, job lock
no longer has a significant effect on job mobility.
Kanika Kapur, Doctoral candidate,
Department of Economics, Northwestern University
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