Employment of Working-Age People with Disabilities in the 1980s and 1990s: What Current Data Can and Cannot Tell Us

Mary C. Daly, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Andrew J. Houtenville, Cornell University

A new and highly controversial literature argues that the employment of working-age people with disabilities fell dramatically in the 1990s. Some researchers and policy makers dismiss these results, arguing that they are fundamentally flawed in that it is based on self-reported work limitations data that captures neither the actual population with disabilities nor its employment trends. We put these criticisms in the context of a broader issue, namely how to define and measure the population with disabilities. Then, using data from the Current Population Survey and the National Health Interview Survey, we test whether the level and trends in employment differ cross alternative empirical definitions. We find that although traditional work limitation-based definitions underestimate the size of the broader population with health impairments, the prevalence and employment trends in the work limitations population and the impairment-based population are not significantly different from one another over the 1980s and 1990s.