Tammy Schirle

Disability insurance take-up has expanded substantially in the past twenty years in the United States while shrinking in Canada. We empirically assess these trends by measuring the strength of the ‘push’ from weak labor markets versus the ‘pull’ of more generous benefits. Using an instrumental variables strategy comparing benefit changes across country, age, and year, we find that both benefits and regional wages matter. Simulations suggest that the upswing in disability insurance take-up in the United States would be reversed, dropping the caseload by one third, if benefits and wages had followed the growth path observed in Canada.

We study the health-capacity to work among older workers in Canada. We estimate work capacity using two methods. The first uses age-specific mortality rates to proxy for overall health, comparing employment rates at similar levels of mortality. The second method uses a mix of health measures to estimate a health-employment relationship at ages 50 to 54, then uses these estimates to project the employment capacity of older workers. Our results suggest a substantial unused capacity for work among older Canadians.

We investigate the importance of the financial incentives for work and retirement embedded in Canada’s public retirement and disability benefit systems. We extend previous research on incentives for retirement by incorporating the structure of incentives in the Canada and Quebec Pension Plan disability benefits, and through careful attention to the impact of self-assessed health status. We find the financial incentives embedded in the public pension system have a significant and substantial effect on the likelihood of entering retirement, but the impact of disability benefits is overshadowed by regular retirement benefits. We also find that the response is driven by those with lower self-assessed health.