Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2-2022
Department 1
Economics
Abstract
The United States’ Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 improved and expanded availability of non-group health insurance. Previous studies have shown that women in the US workforce value health insurance more highly than men do. Because prior to the ACA self-employed individuals did not have guaranteed access to affordable health insurance coverage, women’s relatively lower rate of self-employment may partly have reflected their greater “job lock” due to employer-based health insurance. This article employs nationally representative survey data for 2009–18 and a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference modeling approach and finds that unmarried women’s probability of self-employment increased by 1.2 percentage points in 2015–18, after the ACA’s expansion of non-group health insurance came into effect. Among women who have never married, overall probability of self-employment increased by 1.2–1.5 percentage points versus trend, and the probability of transitioning into full-time self-employment increased by 0.9 percentage points.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
DOI
10.1080/13545701.2022.2118342
Version
Version of Record
Recommended Citation
Blume-Kohout, M. E. (2022). The Affordable Care Act and Women’s Self-Employment in the United States. Feminist Economics, 29(1), 174–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2022.2118342
Required Publisher's Statement
This article is available from the publisher's website.
Included in
Economics Commons, Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons, Insurance Commons, Women's Studies Commons