The Impact of Disability Benefits on Labor Supply: Evidence for the VA’s Disability Compensation Program

David Autor, Mark Duggan, Kyle Greenberg and David Lyle ()
Additional contact information
David Lyle: United States Military Academy

No 14-010, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We analyze the labor market effects of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Disability Compensation (DC) program. The largely unstudied DC program currently provides income and health insurance to approximately four million veterans of military service who have service-connected disabilities. We study a unique policy change, the 2001 Agent Orange decision, which expanded eligibility for DC benefits to a broader set of covered conditions — in particular, type II diabetes — to Vietnam veterans who had served in-theater (with ‘Boots on the Ground’ or BOG). Notably, the Agent Orange policy excluded Vietnam era veterans who did not serve in-theatre (‘Not on Ground’ or NOG), thus allowing us to assess the causal effects of DC eligibility by contrasting the outcomes of BOG and NOG veterans. Our results indicate that the policy-induced increase in DC enrollment reduced labor force participation by 18 percentage points among BOG veterans who enrolled in the DC program as a result of the policy change. We also find evidence of program spillovers, with DC recipients significantly more likely to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits.

Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/14-010.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www-siepr.stanford.edu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Disability Benefits on Labor Supply: Evidence from the VA's Disability Compensation Program (2016)
Working Paper: The Impact of Disability Benefits on Labor Supply: Evidence from the VA's Disability Compensation Program (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sip:dpaper:14-010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).