Great Recession and disability insurance in Spain

Sergi Jimenez-Martin, Arnau Juanmarti Mestres () and Judit Vall Castello
Additional contact information
Arnau Juanmarti Mestres: Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Empirical Economics, 2019, vol. 56, issue 5, No 8, 1623-1645

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, we explore the relationship between economic conditions and disability insurance (DI) participation in Spain during the Great Recession. Using individual-level longitudinal data, we show that DI awards are procyclical, contrary to the countercyclical behavior found in most of the previous literature. We show that DI applications are not responsive to the business cycle and that economic conditions have no effect on the composition of new DI awardees, suggesting that DI participation in Spain is not driven by partially disabled individuals resorting to the DI program as a result of bad labor market conditions. Furthermore, we argue that the procyclical behavior of DI awards may be driven by an informal increase in screening stringency and by an improvement in the health status of the population as a result of worse economic conditions.

Keywords: Disability insurance; Business cycle; Great Recession; Procyclical health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H55 I10 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-017-1396-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Great Recession and Disability Insurance in Spain (2017)
Working Paper: Great Recession and disability insurance in Spain (2017)
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:spr:empeco:v:56:y:2019:i:5:d:10.1007_s00181-017-1396-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-017-1396-1

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().