Disability Policies Across Europe: Reforms and Employment Outcomes for Workers Age 50+

The study will analyse how different approaches to changes in employers' responsibilities and incentives in disability policy in 11 European countries since the 1990s affected labour market attachment and disability enrollment. First, we will describe and assess the adopted reform strategies using aggregate data generated by the OECD for its Disability Policy Typology. We aim to integrate and update these indicators to provide a comprehensive analysis of the reforms including the most recent years. Over the last decades, almost all European countries (as well as the USA) increased employers' obligations towards their employees with health problems. The level of employer responsibility however varies considerably across the OECD and – while accounting comprehensively for other reform components – we investigate this policy dimension and its consequences for the labour market attachment of workers with health problems. We will use micro-data from the cross-country panel Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to provide additional insight from workers' responses to these changes. In particular, we will analyse changes in the labour market situation and health of workers aged 50+, focusing on how their job tenure, unemployment, subjective disability risk and disability insurance enrollment changed between 2003 and 2013.