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Working Paper
The employment of working-age people with disabilities in the 1980s and 1990s: what current data can and cannot tell us
A new and highly controversial literature argues that the employment of working-age people with disabilities fell dramatically relative to the rest of the working-age population in the 1990s. Some dismiss these results as fundamentally flawed because they come from a self-reported work limitation-based disability population that captures neither the actual population with disabilities nor its employment trends. In this paper, we examine the merits of these criticisms. We first consider some of the difficulties of defining and consistently measuring the population with disabilities. We then ...
Working Paper
Economic outcomes of working-age people with disabilities over the business cycle: an examination of the 1980s and 1990s
We examine the rate of employment and the household income of the working-age population (aged 25-61) with and without disabilities over the business cycles of the 1980s and 1990s using data from the March Current Population Survey and the National Health Interview Survey. In general, we find that while the employment of working-age men and women with and without disabilities exhibited a procyclical trend during the 1980s business cycle, this was not the case during the 1990s expansion. During the 1990s, the employment of working-age men and women without disabilities continued to be ...
Working Paper
Employment declines among people with disabilities: population movements, isolated experience, or broad policy concern?
We began by asking whether the decline in employment among those with disabilities was broad-based or narrowly focused, explained by population shifts or changes in behavior and/or opportunities among those with disabilities, or simply reflective of exogenous deteriorations in health, relatively immune from policy corrections. Our findings point strongly towards changes in behavior and/or opportunities as the key to understanding the recent decline. We show that employment declines were very broadbased across key population subgroups, that the largest contributions to the decline were among ...
Working Paper
Self-reported work limitation data: what they can and cannot tell us
Data constraints make the long-term monitoring of the working-age population with disabilities a difficult task. Indeed, the Current Population Survey (CPS) is the only national data source that offers detailed work and income questions and consistently asked measures of disability over a 20-year period. Despite its widespread use in the literature, the CPS and surveys like it have come under attack of late, with critics discounting the results of any research obtained from such data. We put these criticisms in perspective by systematically examining what the CPS data can and cannot be used ...
Journal Article
Recent declines in work and income among men with disabilities