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Date
Jun
06
2006

Effect of Disability on the Employment of Other Household Members

Presenter:

Stephen Mennemeyer

Authors:

Stephen Mennemeyer

Chair: Michael Grossman; Discussant: Reagan Baughman Tue June 6, 2006 10:45-12:15 Room 121

Rationale: While much work has been done on the return-to-work of persons with disabilities, surprising little is know about how the employment of other members of a household is affected by the onset of a disability.

Objective: We examine how household labor decisions are affected by the onset of a disability and by the subsequent “aging” of the disability condition. The main interest here is the extent to which the disability encourages others to go to work to offset the income lost by the person with a disability or to stay home to help with caregiving.

Methodology: We use the Survey of Income and Program Participation 1996 to identify households where members have disabilities, either old (existing prior to the SIPP survey) or new (concurrent with the Survey). We estimate panel data models of employment for both the person with the disability and other household members that control for the type and age of the disability as well as various characteristics of the household and its members.

Results: Results are currently available for stroke with other conditions now under analysis. We find that the occurrence of a stroke tends to permanently reduce the labor supply of the victim. For the non-victims, there is an asymmetric effect: male household members tend to only mildly decrease their employment whereas females make a substantial reduction in employment that tends to persist.

Conclusions: Estimates of the lifetime cost of disabilities need to take account of the lost earnings of other household members

ASHEcon

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The American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon) is a professional organization dedicated to promoting excellence in health economics research in the United States. ASHEcon is an affiliate of the International Health Economics Association (iHEA). ASHEcon provides a forum for emerging ideas and empirical results of health economics research.