The Economics of Social Insurance and Employee Benefits

"The Economics of Social Insurance and Employee Benefits"focuses on non-wage benefits paid to workers in the United States, covering both government-mandated and voluntarily provided benefits.The author argues that benefits affect workplace productivity, andconcentrates on the economic thinking behind how to design non-wagebenefits in order to achieve competitive advantage.Part I briefly introduces these programs and discusses some of theinsurance and economic concepts that are useful both for evaluatingcurrent programs and in analyzing what changes might mean for futurecosts and benefits. Part II deals with mandated social insuranceprograms, while Part III discusses benefits voluntarily provided byemployers. Throughout the book, private sector human resourcepractices and public sector human resource policies are linked tovarious benefit models: the human capital model; the passiveparticipant model; the insurance model; the managed care model; andthe integrated health benefits model. Butler argues that the currentprogram-centered approach to human resource and risk management isoften ineffectual because it (1) ignores overlapping benefits thatmitigate useful cost-sharing mechanisms; (2) often results in theconcentration of benefits among relatively few workers; and (3)sometimes has the unintended consequences of negatively affectingworkers' human capital. In advocating a worker-specific' approach toemployee benefits, the book offers a unique perspective on how humanresource managers, risk managers, and public policy makers can promotethose institutions and programs that best increase workers'productivity.