Working Paper: NBER ID: w19672
Authors: Andreas I. Mueller; Jesse Rothstein; Till M. von Wachter
Abstract: Disability insurance (DI) applications and awards are countercyclical. One potential explanation is that unemployed individuals who exhaust their Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits use DI as a form of extended benefits. We exploit the haphazard pattern of UI benefit extensions in the Great Recession to identify the effect of UI exhaustion on DI application, using both aggregate data at the state-month and state-week levels and microdata on unemployed individuals in the Current Population Survey. We find no indication that expiration of UI benefits causes DI applications. Our estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out effects of meaningful magnitude.
Keywords: Unemployment Insurance; Disability Insurance; Great Recession
JEL Codes: H55; J65
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| UI exhaustion (L15) | DI applications (L68) |
| UI exhaustion (L15) | DI applications (L68) |
| unemployment rate (J64) | DI applications (L68) |
| UI extensions (Y20) | DI applications (L68) |