Mitra & Kruse Find Huge Job Gaps for Disabled Workers

Sophie Mitra (Fordham Dep't Econ.) and Douglas Kruse (Rutgers - Management & Labor) have just published a significant new empirical study of the impact of disability on employment. The article is Are Workers with Disabilities More Likely to be Displaced?, and unfortunately their answer is "yes". The article is published at International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 27(4), pp. 1550-1579, 2016; here's the abstract:

The literature on employment and disability has been relatively silent regarding the job loss experience of persons with disabilities. We document the gap in job displacement rates across disability status in the United States over the 2007–2013 period using data from the 2010, 2012 and 2014 Displaced Worker Supplements of the Current Population Survey. We find that men and women with disabilities are, respectively, 75 and 89% more likely to experience an involuntary job loss than men and women without disabilities in the United States over the 2007–2013 period, with gaps in displacement rates of eight and seven percentage points for men and women, respectively. A significant gap is found in most occupation-education subsamples. Using a logit decomposition, we find that differences in observable characteristics do not explain the gap in the job loss rate across disability status. Longitudinal tests following workers over a one-year period point to a causal effect of disability on the likelihood of displacement. While the disability gap may be due to unobservable characteristics, job mismatch and employer discrimination are also possible explanations, highlighting the potential importance of employer and public policies in improving the job security of workers with disabilities.

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