Disability Insurance: Error Rates and Gender Differences

Hamish Low and Luigi Pistaferri

No 26513, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We show the extent of screening errors made in disability insurance awards using matched survey-administrative data. Type I errors are widespread with large gender differences. Work-disabled women are 12.8 percentage points more likely to be rejected than work-disabled men, controlling for health conditions and demographics. Gender differences arise because women are assessed with more residual work capacity. We model the SSA decision-making process and estimate that gender differences in screening errors originate from lower utility losses from incorrectly rejecting women. Finally, noise in self-reported work limitation leads to an overstatement of screening errors, but the gender difference remains.

JEL-codes: H55 J16 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-lma
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26513.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Disability Insurance: Error Rates and Gender Differences (2019)
Working Paper: Disability Insurance: Error Rates and Gender Differences (2019)
Working Paper: Disability Insurance: Error Rates and Gender Differences (2019)
Working Paper: Disability Insurance: Error Rates and Gender Differences (2019)
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:nbr:nberwo:26513

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26513

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().