Disability benefit recipients in the United States have nearly doubled in the past two decades, growing substantially faster than the population. It is difficult to estimate how much of this increase is explained by changes in population health, as we often lack a valid counterfactual. We...

In the last twenty years the labor force participation rates of 45 to 54-year-old men have fallen 10.6 percentage points among non-whites and 4.4 percentage points among whites. I find that nearly half of this puzzling decline can be explained by the growth of the Social Security Disability...

This paper examines the impact of state merit-aid programs on the labor market attachment of high school-aged youths. The labor force participation rate of teenagers has fallen substantially in recent decades, coinciding with the introduction of merit-aid programs. These programs reduce the...

The paper provides a perspective on the development of the Belgian disability insurance system. Using both survey and administrative data, it sketches a picture of the (changing) factors leading towards disability, as well as the outcomes in terms of program participation. The paper shows the...

Using longitudinal data for 1968-2009 for male household heads, we determine the prevalence of pre- retirement age disability and its association with a wide range of outcomes, including earnings, income, and consumption. We then employ some of these quantities in the optimal social insurance...

Japan has experienced pronounced population aging, and now has the highest proportion of elderly adults in the world. Yet few projections of Japan's future demography go beyond estimating population by age and sex to forecast the complex evolution of the health and functioning of the future...

Data on 2225 men and 2401 women from the National Comorbidity Survey were used to examine the impact of psychiatric disorders on employment and conditional work hours and income. Two-stage instrumental variables methods were used to correct for the potential endogeneity of psychiatric disorders....

In this paper, we use a two-stage bargaining model to analyze the living arrangement of a disabled elderly parent and the assistance provided to the parent by her adult children. The first stage determines the living arrangement: the parent can live in a nursing home, live alone in the...

The application process is critical to the targeting of disability programs because disability, relative to other tags, is difficult to observe and costly to verify. We study the effect of application costs on the targeting of disability programs using the closings of Social Security...

A substantial portion of the costs associated with, and the value to beneficiaries of, Social Security Disability Insurance is Medicare eligibility. However, the benefits of this eligibility can vary due to differences in state policies on supplemental Medicare coverage, also known as Medigap....