Did the Employment of People with Disabilities Decline in the 1990s, and was the ADA Responsible? A Replication and Robustness Check of Acemoglu and Angrist (2001) - Research Brief

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) (P.L. 101-336) gives civil rights protections to persons with disabilities similar to those provided on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, age, and religion. Title I of the ADA prohibits discrimination in employment practices by private employers, state and local governments, employment agencies, and labor unions for employers with 15 or more employees.1 The ADA requires employers to offer “reasonable accommodation” to employees with disabilities and prohibits discrimination in hiring, promotion, and firing. The goal of the ADA is to level the playing field in employment for people with disabilities and better integrate working age people with disabilities into the labor market. In 2001, Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist published their seminal paper, Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They examined employment time-trends among workers with disabilities from 1988 (shortly before the passage of the ADA) to 1996, using data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS), to determine whether the ADA influenced the employment of people with disabilities. Their key finding was that the CPS data showed a post-ADA decline in employment among young men and women with disabilities. Controlling for other employment factors, including the increased number of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) recipients, they concluded that the ADA led to reduced employment for younger workers with disabilities. Their results were less clear cut for older workers. They cited the cost to employers of compliance with the ADA and fear of lawsuits as potential causes of the observed decline in employment. Acemoglu and Angrist’s (2001) emphasis on the ADA as a deterrent to increased employment triggered a lively debate about whether the ADA or other factors were responsible. More fundamentally, some researchers questioned whether this decline was real or merely an artifact of inadequacies in the CPS data used to quantify employment trends among people with disabilities. In Houtenville and Burkhauser (2004), the research summarized in this brief, we address the key questions: (a) did the employment of people with disabilities decline in the 1990s? and (b) was the ADA responsible for the decline? The evidence we present, described below, leads us to conclude that the employment rate did decline, but that the decline was not a consequence of the ADA

Employing those not expected to work: The stunning changes in the employment of single mothers and people with disabilities in the United States in the 1990s

This report compares the dramatic changes in the level of government benefits provided to single mothers and people with disabilities, especially in the 1990s. While welfare reforms and economic growth during the 1990s led to a dramatic increase in the employment of single women with children, the employment rate of individuals with disabilities dramatically declined, and continued to decline, in spite of peak periods of economic growth over the business cycle

Obesity, Disability, and Movement Onto the Disability Insurance Rolls

Between the early 1980s and 2002, both the prevalence of obesity and the number of beneficiaries of the Social Security Disability Insurance program doubled. We test whether these trends are related; specifically, we test whether obesity causes disability and movement onto the disability rolls. We estimate models of instrumental variables using two nationally representative data sets, the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort. The results are mixed but we find evidence that weight increases the probability of health-related work limitations and the probability of receiving disability related income. Our results suggest that the failure to treat obesity as endogenous leads to dramatic underestimates of the link between obesity and disability outcomes. Authors’ Acknowledgements We thank seminar participants at Ohio State University and the 2004 Conference of the Social Security Retirement Research Consortium for their helpful comments. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the University of Michigan Retirement Research Consortium and the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell University. We thank Shuaizhang Feng for expert research assistance.

Employment among Working-Age People with Disabilities: What the Latest Data Can Tell Us Abstract.

We review the recent evidence on the employment experiences of the working-age population with disabilities gained from four large representative samples of the United States population: the Current Population Survey-Annual Social and Economic Supplement, American Community Survey, the National Health Interview Survey, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation linked to Social Security Administration records. Using a consistent conceptualization of disability we put the employment patterns of the working-age population with disabilities captured in these data within a coherent framework. We conclude that the patterns we find cannot be explained by differences in underlying impairment across time, states or within these populations at a given time or place. Rather we argue that the work environment, rehabilitation opportunities, and individual responses to these external factors by those with a given level of impairment are likely to be as important in explaining these employment patterns as differences as health-related factors

Who Gets What from Employer Pay or Play Mandates?

Critics of pay or play mandates, borrowing from the large empirical minimum wage literature, provide evidence that they reduce employment. Borrowing from a smaller empirical minimum wage literature, we provide evidence that they also are a blunt instrument for funding health insurance for the working poor. The vast majority of those who benefit from pay or play mandates which require employers to either provide appropriate health insurance for their workers or pay a flat per hour tax to offset the cost of health care live in families with incomes twice the poverty line or more and, depending on how coverage is determined, the mandate will leave a significant share of the working poor ineligible for such benefits either because their hourly wage rate is too high or they work for smaller exempt firms.

Social Security Reform: A Budget Neutral Approach to Reducing Older Women's Disproportional Risk of Poverty

Perhaps the single greatest achievement of social policy in the United States over the last three decades has been reducing poverty in old age. The transition from work to retirement is no longer economically perilous for the vast majority of older American workers. For most married couples, the risk of falling into poverty even several years after retirement is small. But when one partner of the marriage dies, the survivor faces another much more risky economic transition. The single greatest risk of falling into poverty in old age now comes after the death of a spouse, as the survivor faces life after marriage. And this risk disproportionately affects older women, who are nearly three times as likely as older men to be widowed (49 percent to 14 percent) and can expect to remain widowed an average of 17 years. Here we document the disproportionate risk of poverty faced by such survivors and show that the Social Security system in the United States has been much less successful in protecting single older people from poverty, especially single older women, than government-administered social security systems in other post-industrialized countries. We argue that this lack of success stems in part from the failure of the Social Security program to transform the basis for its payout rules from a "traditional" one-earner family model to a model more consistent with today's families in which both the husband and wife work. We then offer a budget neutral plan to redistribute some of the benefits a married couple receive over their lifetime from the years they are both alive to the years following the death of a spouse, which we argue would substantially reduce the risk of poverty faced by older women.

Economics of Disability Research Report #6: Comparing the Robustness of Economic Outcomes Measured in the CPS and NHIS Data

Using data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS), Burkhauser, Daly and Houtenville (2001) show that the employment rates of working-age people with disabilities declined over the 1990s business cycle and that this population did not proportionally share in gains of 1990s economic growth. In this report we use the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to test the robustness of these controversial findings. We first compare the concepts of disability, employment, and household income in the CPS and NHIS. We then develop hypotheses regarding the differences we find when using these concepts to estimate disability prevalence rates, employment rates, and mean household size-adjusted income with the CPS and NHIS. Finally, we carry out these estimates for working-age men and women with disabilities over the year 1983 through 1996 using these two data sets