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Household Preferences and Joint Decisions on Employer‐Provided Health Insurance Access

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Manchester School

Published online on

Abstract

This paper examines how spousal access to employer‐provided health insurance (EPHI) affects preferences to acquire the same access at both the individual and household level. Regarding household decision process as a cooperative, simultaneous game between husband and wife, the empirical results show that spousal access to EPHI is negatively related to own EPHI access, indicating that household members as a unit prefer single EPHI access to dual access. Using family income share as a proxy for individual indirect utility, this study shows that the husband's incremental disutility of having spousal EPHI access is greater than that of the wife.