Morning Must-Read: Gary Burtless: Employment impacts of the Affordable Care Act

…As it happens, all of the job gains that have occurred since March 2010 have been in full-time employment…. Has the ACA increased part-time work among people who would prefer to hold full-time jobs?… The percentage of job holders who have part-time jobs but who would prefer full-time work… remains stubbornly higher than it was the last time the unemployment rate was 5.5%.  If the entire gap is traceable to the impact of the ACA, the law has increased the number of workers who involuntarily hold part-time jobs by more than 1 million. My guess is that the number of workers who involuntarily hold part-time jobs has remained high because of the weakness of the economic recovery rather than the effect of the ACA. It is not easy to devise a statistical test that allows us to confirm this suspicion, however. Even if it were true that the ACA has induced employers to create more part-time jobs and fewer full-time jobs, it is not obvious whether this shift reduced workers’ well-being…. If total work hours remain unchanged it also follows that more workers must hold jobs, reducing the number of involuntarily unemployed workers. It seems odd that critics of the ACA emphasize the potentially adverse impacts of the law on workers forced to accept part-time jobs but fail to notice that their logic suggests more workers in total must be employed…