Health, Employment, and Disability

George Borjas and David Slusky

American Journal of Health Economics, 2022, vol. 8, issue 1, 1 - 29

Abstract: The number of disability beneficiaries has doubled in the past two decades. It is difficult to determine how much is explained by changes in health, as we lack a counterfactual. We use undocumented immigrants to form the counterfactual, as they cannot claim benefits. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, we show that the relationship between health and disability is stronger for the legal population than for the undocumented. Much of the difference in disability rates between the populations is due to different labor supply responses to underlying health impairments and demographic differences, rather than to differences in the impairments or demographic variables themselves.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/716465 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/716465 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:amjhec:doi:10.1086/716465

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Health Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().