2008 Progress Report on the Economic Well-Being of Working Age People with Disabilities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Employment and Income Status of Adults With Developmental Disabilities Living in the Community
Mental Retardation, 2002
A comprehensive national portrait of employment and income status of adults with developmental disabilities was estimated through secondary analyses of the 1990 and the 1991 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Results indicate that the majority of adults with developmental disabilities had very limited economic resources, even when earnings from employment and benefits from governmental income support programs were both included. The minority, who worked in a variety of occupations, were earning higher incomes than previous estimates. The overwhelming majority were unemployed. Implications of the low-income profile and potential underutilization of employment services was discussed.
2001
A new and highly controversial literature argues that the employment of working-age people with disabilities fell dramatically relative to the rest of the working-age population in the 1990s. Some dismiss these results as fundamentally flawed because they come from a selfreported work limitation-based disability population that captures neither the actual population with disabilities nor its employment trends. In this paper, we examine the merits of these criticisms. We first consider some of the difficulties of defining and consistently measuring the population with disabilities. We then discuss how these measurement difficulties potentially bias empirical estimates of the prevalence of disability and of the employment behavior of those with disabilities. Having provided a context for our analysis, we use data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to compare the prevalence and employment rates across two empirical populations of those with disabilities: one defined by self-reported impairments and one defined by self-reported work limitations. We find that although traditional work limitation-based definitions underestimate the size of the broader population with health impairments, the employment trends in the populations defined by work limitations and impairments are not significantly different from one another over the 1980s and 1990s. We then show that the trends in employment observed for the NHIS population defined by self-reported work limitations are statistically similar to those found in the Current Population Survey (CPS). Based on this analysis, we argue that nationally representative employment-based data sets like the CPS can be used to monitor the employment trends of those with disabilities over the past two decades.
We examine the rate of employment and the household income of the working-age population (aged 25-61) with and without disabilities over the business cycles of the 1980s and 1990s using data from the March Current Population Survey and the National Health Interview Survey. In general, we find that while the employment of working-age men and women with and without disabilities exhibited a procyclical trend during the 1980s business cycle, this was not the case during the 1990s expansion. During the 1990s, the employment of working-age men and women without disabilities continued to be procyclical, but the employment rates of their counterparts with disabilities declined over the entire 1990s business cycle. Although increases in disability transfer income replaced a significant fraction of their lost earnings, the household income of men and women with disabilities fell relative to the rest of the population over the decade.
2001
We examine the rate of employment and the household income of the working-age population (aged 25-61) with and without disabilities over the business cycles of the 1980s and 1990s using data from the March Current Population Survey and the National Health Interview Survey. In general, we find that while the employment of working-age men and women with and without disabilities exhibited a procyclical trend during the 1980s business cycle, this was not the case during the 1990s expansion. During the 1990s, the employment of working-age men and women without disabilities continued to be procyclical, but the employment rates of their counterparts with disabilities declined over the entire 1990s business cycle. Although increases in disability transfer income replaced a significant fraction of their lost earnings, the household income of men and women with disabilities fell relative to the rest of the population over the decade.
The Employment Rate of People with Disabilities
Monthly Labor Review, 2008
Promoting employment for people with disabilities has long been an important policy objective in the United States. Some examples of Federal policies whose goal is to increase employment for people with disabilities are the vocational rehabilitation system, funded by grants from the U.S. Rehabilitation Services Administration to the States; the Ticket to Work program; the Work Opportunity Tax Credit; and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Many of these policies are relatively new; yet analysts have noted a decline in the employment rate of people with disabilities in recent years,1 and some evaluations of the ADA indicate that, rather than increasing employment, the Act may have reduced employment for those with disabilities. These surprising findings have led some observers to take a closer look at employment statistics for such individuals. Perhaps, they argue, it is not that the programs and policies have failed to aid disabled individuals in finding employment; rather, t...