‘Unemployment Insurance and Disability Insurance in the Great Recession’

Via Economist’s View comes this note on ‘Unemployment Insurance and Disability Insurance in the Great Recession’

From the NBER Digest:

The authors find very little interaction between UI benefit eligibility and SSDI applications, and conclude that SSDI applications do not appear to respond to UI exhaustion. While the authors cannot rule out small effects, they conclude that SSDI applications do not respond strongly enough to contribute meaningfully to a cost-benefit analysis of UI extensions or to account for the cyclical behavior of SSDI applications.

The authors suggest that the tendency for the number of SSDI applications to grow when the economy is weak may reflect variation in the potential reemployment wages of displaced workers, or changes in the employment opportunities of the marginally disabled that influence the evaluation of an SSDI applicant’s employability. These channels are not linked to the generosity or duration of UI benefits, and they imply that more stringent functional capacity reviews of SSDI applicants may not reduce recession-induced SSDI claims if these claims reflect examiners’ judgments that the applicants are truly not employable in the existing labor market.