The Labor-Market Impact of San Francisco's Employer-Benefit Mandate

We evaluate a San Francisco policy requiring employers to provide health benefits or contribute to a public-option health plan to better understand the incidence of employer mandates through their effects on wages, employment, and prices. We develop an individual case study approach combining border discontinuity in policies and permutation-type inference using other metropolitan areas. Findings indicate that employment patterns did not change appreciably following the policy, and there is little evidence of significant negative earnings in highly impacted sectors. However, approximately half of the incidence of the mandate in the restaurant sector fell on consumers via surcharges.