AIER: Why Fiscal Warnings Fall on Deaf Ears

From the American Institute for Economic Research:

Why Fiscal Warnings Fall on Deaf Ears: The most profound and important insight from Miron's contribution is the political resistance to sufficient spending cuts, which are unavoidable, since neither higher taxes nor higher growth provide a path to solvency.

Casey Mulligan's latest study on the labor market effects of the Affordable Care Act

From University of Chicago's Casey Mulligan, a new paper titled, "The Employer Penalty, Voluntary Compliance, and the Size Distribution of Firms: Evidence from a Survey of Small Businesses."

Abstract: 

A new survey of 745 small businesses shows little change in the size distribution of businesses between 2012 and 2016, except among businesses with 40-74 employees, in a way that is closely related to whether they offer health insurance coverage.  Using measures of both size and voluntary regulatory compliance, the paper links these changes to the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate.  Between 28,000 and 50,000 businesses nationwide appear to be reducing their number of full-time-equivalent employees to below 50 because of that mandate.  This translates to roughly
250,000 positions eliminated from those businesses. 

The gated paper is available at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Another study on health insurance for low-income adults based on the Massachusetts health care law

A new NBER Working Paper by Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, Mark Shepard 

Abstract:

How much are low-income individuals willing to pay for health insurance, and what are the implications for insurance markets? Using administrative data from Massachusetts' subsidized insurance exchange, we exploit discontinuities in the subsidy schedule to estimate willingness to pay and costs of insurance among low-income adults.  As subsidies decline, insurance take-up falls rapidly, dropping about 25% for each $40 increase in monthly enrollee premiums.  Marginal enrollees tend to be lower-cost, consistent with adverse selection into insurance.  But across the entire distribution we can observe - approximately the bottom 70% of the willingness to pay distribution - enrollee willingness to pay is always less than half of own expected costs.  As a result, we estimate that take-up will be highly incomplete even with generous subsidies:  if enrollee premiums were 25% of insurers' average costs, at most half of potential enrollees would buy insurance; even premiums subsidized to 10% of average costs would still leave at least 20% uninsured. We suggest an important role for uncompensated care for the uninsured in explaining these findings and explore normative implications.

More here.