Social Insurance and Truncated Benefits : Measuring the Impacts of Workers' Compensation

Abstract EN

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.