Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The past three decades have seen dramatic increases in SSDI applications and entry, creating an imperative to improve the labor market attachment of the disabled population. Strengthening or broadening disability discrimination laws are often-used ways to increase this labor market attachment. However, research on the effects of these laws on the employment of the disabled population is mixed, ranging from negative to null to positive impacts. Our research addresses this lack of consensus in four ways: first, instead of limiting analyses to a single legislative change, it will examine multiple major state and federal disability anti-discrimination laws, and their major judicial re-interpretations, from pre-ADA to post-ADAAA, exploiting differences among these laws beyond those analyzed in other studies to determine which provisions have an impact, positively or negatively; second, our analysis will provide estimates of these laws’ effects across the diverse disabled population, with special focus on conditions salient to potential employers; third, we will analyze a rich set of labor market outcomes (hiring, separations, and employment); and fourth, by studying multiple policy changes, we will estimate how these effects differ depending on the strength of the labor market in general.