social insurance and truncated benefits measuring the impacts of workers compensation社会保险和截断效益衡量的影响工人的赔偿.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Economics Research International Volume 2012, Article ID 652056, 21 pages doi:10.1155/2012/652056 Research Article Social Insurance and Truncated Benefits: Measuring the Impacts of Workers’ Compensation Samuel K. Allen Department of Economics Business, Virginia Military Institute, 333 Scott Shipp Hall, Lexington, VA 24450, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Samuel K. Allen, allensk@ Received 21 March 2012; Accepted 25 May 2012 Academic Editor: Almas Heshmati Copyright © 2012 Samuel K. Allen. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This study addresses the indirect impacts of state-mandated workers’ compensation benefits on workers’ wages. The benefit structure of workers’ compensation causes a fundamental estimation problem. I develop a new strategy to limit the biases inherent in earlier models. I utilize individual-level census data (between 1940 and 1990) to exploit benefit variation that occurs both across states and within the fifty states over time. The results suggest that wage offsets are not constant across time and may be larger for workers at lower-wage levels. 1. Introduction benefits are determined by a nonlinear function of the work- ers’ own wage. State workers’ compensation laws require nearly all employ- This paper adds to the understanding of workers’ com- ers to purchase insurance to provide benefits to workers inj- pensation and compensating differentials in several ways. ured on the job. This type o