Comparing Economic Outcomes of Populations with Disabilities - A Method for Comparing the Economic Outcomes of the Working-Age Population with Disabilities in Germany and United States

Using a work limitation-based measure of disability, researchers have found that the employment of working-age men (aged 21-58) with disabilities fell dramatically relative to such men without disabilities in the United States in the 1990s. Because no such measure of the population with disabilities is consistently provided for Germany, this paper develops two alternative work limitation-based measures of disability in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Using these measures we find that while the relative employment of working-age men in Germany fell in the 1980s, in contrast to the United States, it rose over the 1990s.