مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد ناتوانی جزئی و تنظیم بازار کار (الزویر)

Disability policies have recently attracted attention, particularly in OECD countries, because they represent an important share of public spending and also because societies are increasingly concerned about the need to promote the integration of people with disabilities. For these reasons, the possibility of increasing the number of disabled individuals who work is regarded as a good strategy to decrease pressure on the financial stability of social security systems as well as to achieve the social integration of people with disabilities (OECD, 2007). The impact of disability regulations on the employment of disabled individuals has been documented in a recent book by Burkhauser and Daly (2011) and in several papers for the case of the U.S. (Autor and Duggan 2006, 2007, 2008; Autor et al. 2011; Benítez-Silva and Heiland, 2007, 2008). With regard to the U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, researchers seem to agree that the disability program rules and, in particular, its work-contingent basis, have been the main explanation for the reported decline in the employment rates of individuals with disabilities. That is, individuals stop working to qualify for disability benefits even though they maintain some capacity to work. In line with this, the promotion of the employment of disabled individuals is particularly relevant for the Spanish case because, unlike other disability systems in developed economies, the Spanish system is not contingent on working status and, therefore, allows partially disabled individuals to work while they receive disability benefits. The puzzle is, however, that employment rates for this group of disabled individuals are very low: the country reported an average employment rate of just 13.6 percent for people with partial disability from 2001 to 2011, which contrasts with the observed rate for nondisabled employees (75.3 percent)1 . This suggests that, even in non-working contingent programs, hiring and fiscal regulations regarding disabled workers can generate disincentives to work. Therefore, in this paper we analyze the incentives and disincentives to work in Spain from the point of view of both disabled individuals and employers. The central goal of the study is twofold: (i) identify how differences in workers’ characteristics explain the low employment rates of partially disabled individuals vis-à-vis their nondisabled counterparts; (ii) analyze the sensitivity of the employment rates to changes in the parameters of the Spanish disability system. The final aim is to reach some conclusions about the types of policy initiatives that might be more effective in increasing both individual incentives to work as well as employers’ incentives to hire disabled workers.