Many Belgian retire well before the statutory retirement age. Numerous exit routes from the labor force can be identified: old-age pensions, conventional early retirement, disability insurance, and unemployment insurance are the most prominent ones. We analyze the retirement decision of Belgian...

The paper studies retirement behavior of wage‐earners in Belgium – for the first time using rich survey data to explore retirement incentives as faced by individuals. Specifically, we use SHARE data to estimate a model à la Stock and Wise (1990). Exploring the longitudinal nature of...

This paper addresses whether children's exposure to parents receiving disability benefits induces a higher probability of receiving such benefits themselves. Most OECD countries experience an increasing proportion of the working-age population receiving permanent disability benefits. Using data...

Among countries with comparable levels of income, India has one of the more progressive disability policy frameworks; however, people with disabilities in India are subject to multiple disadvantages. This paper focuses on state-level variations in outcomes for people with disabilities to provide...

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases...

We analyze the impact of working and contractual conditions, particularly exposure to job risks, on the probability of acquiring a disability. We postulate a model in which this impact is mediated by the choice of occupation, with a level of risk associated to it. We assume this choice is...

This paper explores how extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits targeted to older workers affect early retirement and social welfare. The trade-off of optimal UI between consumption smoothing and moral hazard requires accounting for the entire early retirement system, which often includes...

Canadian disability policy has come a long way in the past century. However, in contrast with the evidence that disability is not permanent for most, current disability support programs still carry the old static view of permanent disability. By employing a dynamic panel data model of labour...

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...

In this paper we use Portuguese data on individual (multiple) unemployment spells and apply semi-parametric duration models to investigate the effects of different types of disabilities on (re)employment probabilities. We find that disabled persons with muscular, skeletal, geriatric and...