We provide an empirical analysis of the Social Security disability application, award, and appeal process using the Health and Retirement Survey. We show that the appeal option increases the award probability from 46\% to 73\%. However, this comes at the cost of significant delays: the duration...

A pervasive concern with the use of self-reported health and disability measures in behavioral models is that they are biased and endogenous. A commonly suggested explanation is that survey respondents exaggerate the severity of health problems and incidence of disabilities in order to...