Equal health, equal work? The role of disability benefits in employment after controlling for health status

Eva Frutos () and Judit Vall Castello

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2015, vol. 16, issue 3, 329-340

Abstract: In Spain, an individual can be considered legally disabled in one of the following two ways: by either receiving a disability support benefit and/or holding a certificate of disability. Having at least one of these official sanctions entitles the disabled person to a number of financial and tax advantages. However, only support benefits entail a monthly allowance and, at the same time, the individual is required to undertake a different job to that of his/her previous one. To jointly estimate (after controlling for the health characteristics of the disabling condition and for unobserved factors) the probability of receiving disability benefits and the probability of working, we make use of a newly released database of individuals with a certificate of disability. Additionally, we exploit the rich set of health measures that this database also provides. Our results show that the probability of working is 5 % lower (average treatment effect, ATE) for those disabled individuals receiving benefits. However, when we perform the estimation for individuals with differing degrees of disability, the disincentive effects of the benefits are only significant for individuals with the mildest level of disability (33–44 %) i.e. those who are on the threshold of being disabled. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Disability benefits; Employment probabilities; Health measures; Average treatment effect; I18; J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10198-014-0577-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:eujhec:v:16:y:2015:i:3:p:329-340

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-014-0577-5

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg

More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().