We study a fundamental reform of the public Disability Insurance (DI) system in Germany. Effective 2001, cohorts born after 1960 are no longer eligible for "occupational DI." Occupational DI (ODI) implies benefit eligibility when health shocks prevent employees from working in their previous...

Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, the United States' two primary disability income support programs, each offer a pathway to public health insurance in addition to cash benefits. This implies that expansions in public health insurance availability, such as...

While special education has become a hotly debated issue of school policy, most of the discussion has centered on the aggregate costs of providing mandated programs for disabled children. Little attention has been paid to the effectiveness of such programs or possible interactions with the...

The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to accommodate disabled workers and outlaws discrimination against the disabled in hiring, firing, and pay. Although the ADA was meant to increase employment of the disabled, it also increases costs for employers. The net theoretical...

There has been a significant recent growth in the Social Security Administration's Disability Insurance (DI) program, both in the number of covered workers under the program and in the amount of monthly benefits, One possible factor causing this growth has been labor supply disincentives under...

We provide the first evidence on the relationship between disability programs and markers of financial distress: bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, and home sale. Rates of these adverse financial events peak around the time of disability application and subsequently fall for both allowed and...

This paper examines the pathways by which individuals transition from healthy to disabled. Because of the high prevalence and costs associated with disability, understanding these pathways is critical to developing interventions to prevent or minimize disability. We compare two estimates of...

The U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) currently provides disability benefits to 2.72 million veterans of U.S. military service through the Disability Compensation (DC) program. Until recently, the medical eligibility criteria for this program were the same across service eras, with the...

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) broadly prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in employment and other settings. Several empirical studies have suggested that employment levels of individuals with disabilities declined rather than increased after the ADA's passage....

To assess the consequences of advance medical directives -- which explicitly specify a patient's preferences for one or more specific types of medical treatment in the event of a loss of competence we analyze the medical care of elderly Medicare beneficiaries who died between 1985-1995. We...