TY - JOUR AU - Behaghel, Luc AU - Blanchet, Didier AU - Debrand, Thierry AU - Roger, Muriel TI - Disability and Social Security Reforms: The French Case JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17055 PY - 2011 Y2 - May 2011 DO - 10.3386/w17055 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17055 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17055.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Luc Behaghel Paris School of Economics - Inra 48 boulevard Jourdan 75014 PARIS FRANCE E-Mail: luc.behaghel@ens.fr Didier Blanchet INSEE 88 Avenue Verdier 92541 MONTROUGE CEDEX FRANCE E-Mail: didier.blanchet@insee.fr Thierry Debrand OFCE - IRDES 69, quai d'Orsay 75340 Paris Cedex 07 France E-Mail: thierryd2007@gmail.com Muriel Roger CES - Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne 106-112 boulevard de l'Hôpital 75013 Paris France Tel: 33 1 44 07 81 36 E-Mail: Muriel.Roger@univ-paris1.fr M1 - published as Luc Behaghel, Didier Blanchet, Thierry Debrand, Muriel Roger. "Disability and Social Security Reforms: The French Case," in David A. Wise, editor, "Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: Historical Trends in Mortality and Health, Employment, and Disability Insurance Participation and Reforms" University of Chicago Press (2012) M3 - presented at "International Social Security Conference", May 2, 2011 AB - The French pattern of early transitions out of employment is basically explained by the low age at "normal" retirement and by the importance of transitions through unemployment insurance and early-retirement schemes before access to normal retirement. These routes have exempted French workers from massively relying on disability motives for early exits, contrarily to the situation that prevails in some other countries where normal ages are high, unemployment benefits low and early-retirement schemes almost non-existent. Yet the role of disability remains interesting to examine in the French case, at least for prospective reasons in a context of decreasing generosity of other programs. The study of the past reforms of the pension system underlines that disability routes have often acted as a substitute to other retirement routes. Changes in the claiming of invalidity benefits seem to match changes in pension schemes or controls more than changes in such health indicators as the mortality rates. However, our results suggest that increases in average health levels over the past two decades have come along with increased disparities. In that context, less generous pensions may induce an increase in the claiming of invalidity benefits partly because of substitution effects, but also because the share of people with poor health increases. ER -