TY  - JOUR
AU  - Mueller, Andreas I
AU  - Rothstein, Jesse
AU  - von Wachter, Till M
TI  - Unemployment Insurance and Disability Insurance in the Great Recession
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 19672
PY  - 2013
Y2  - November 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w19672
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19672
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19672.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Andreas I. Mueller
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Economics
2225 Speedway
Austin, TX 78712
Tel: 512/232-3894
E-Mail: andimueller@utexas.edu

Jesse Rothstein
Goldman School of Public Policy and
  Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
2607 Hearst Avenue #7320
Berkeley, CA 94720-7320
Tel: 510/495-0646
Fax: 510/643-9657
E-Mail: rothstein@berkeley.edu

Till M. von Wachter
Department of Economics
University of California, Los Angeles
8283 Bunche Hall
MC 147703
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Tel: 310-825-5665
Fax: 310-825-9528
E-Mail: tvwachter@econ.ucla.edu
M1  - published as Andreas I. Mueller, Jesse Rothstein, Till M. von Wachter. "Unemployment Insurance and Disability Insurance in the Great Recession," in David Card and Alexandre Mas, organizers, "Labor Markets in the Aftermath of the Great Recession" Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 34, Number S1, part 2 (2016)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2014-04-25
AB  - 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.
ER  -