Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) take-up tends to increase during recessions. We exploit variation across immigrant groups in the non-pecuniary costs of participating in SSDI to examine the role that costs play in applicant decisions across the business cycle. We show that immigrants...

Texas is the only state that does not mandate that employers carry workers' compensation insurance (WC) coverage. We employ a quasi-experimental design paired with a novel machine learning approach to examine the effects of switching from traditional workers' compensation to a so-called...

Courts typically base compensation for loss of income in personal injury cases on either mean or median work income. Yet, quantatively, mean and median incomes are typically very different. For example, in the US median income is 65 percent of mean income. In this paper we use economic theory to...

Research consistently finds more workplace injuries occur on Mondays than on other weekdays. One hypothesis is that workers fraudulently claim that off-the-job weekend sprains and strains occurred at work on the Monday in order to receive workers' compensation. We test this using data from New...

Child labor is a common consequence of economic shocks in developing countries. We show how reducing vulnerability can affect child labor and schooling. We exploit the extension of a health and accident insurance scheme by a Pakistani microfinance institution (MFI) that was set up as a...

New Zealand has a unique accident insurance system that pays the direct costs of all accidental injuries and compensates workers 80% of their earnings for any time post-injury that they are unable to work. Statistics New Zealand's Linked Employer-Employee Database contains monthly information on...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of benefit generosity on claim duration and temporary benefits paid among temporary disability claims for workers' compensation. While previous studies have focused on natural experiments created by one-time large changes in minimum or maximum weekly...

Workers with fixed-term contracts typically have worse health than workers with permanent contracts. We show that these differences in health translate into a substantially higher (30%) risk of applying for disability insurance (DI) in the Netherlands. Using unique administrative data on health...

Using longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey (2001-2013) we examine the relationship between the dynamics of work-limiting disability and employment, hours of work, earnings and life satisfaction. We employ two alternative classifications of...

This study provides insight in the responsiveness of disabled workers to financial incentives, using administrative individual data from the Netherlands from 2006 to 2013. We focus on workers receiving partial DI benefits and with substantial residual work capacities that can be exploited. After...