The Canada/Quebec pension plan disability program and the labor force participation of older men

The effects of the Canadian disability insurance program on the labor force participation of older men are studied using pooled cross-sectional time series data from ten Canadian provinces.     

An exploration of the environmental and rider characteristics associated with disability paratransit trip delay

Over the past two decades, a number of studies have been published on the efficiency of paratransit service for persons with disabilities. Although speed, delay, and pick-up duration can significantly affect overall efficiency of paratransit service, studies that have focused on these performance measures have been rare. This study examines how these performance measures are associated with local environmental characteristics such as density and the characteristics of the trip makers. It uses a dataset containing detailed information on a large volume of trips made by the registered clients of Access Link, a paratransit service operated by NJ TRANSIT for persons with disabilities. To measure speed and delay, network distances for 1.91 million trips were estimated by the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension. Analysis of variance and regression models were used to examine the associations between the performance measures and a set of variables pertaining to trips, passengers, and characteristics of pick-up and drop-off locations. Models for the entire study area as well as specific Access Link regions show that there is a significant association between local environmental and personal characteristics of passengers and the performance measures. Evidence was found that higher density of population, employment, and intersections at the local level may have a significant adverse effect on service efficiency because of lower speed and higher delay. Planning implications of the findings are discussed.     

A life-cycle model of unemployment and disability insurance

A general equilibrium life-cycle model is developed, in which individuals choose a sequence of saving and labor supply faced with search frictions and uncertainty in longevity, health status and medical expenditures. Unemployed individuals decide whether to apply for disability insurance (DI) benefits if eligible. We investigate the effects of cash transfer and in-kind Medicare component of the DI system on the life-cycle employment. Without Medicare benefits, DI coverage could fall significantly. We also study how DI interacts with reforms of Social Security and Medicare and find that DI enrollment amplifies the effects of reforms.     

Optimal Social Insurance with Linear Income Taxation*

We study optimal social insurance aimed at insuring disability risk in the presence of linear income taxation. Optimal disability insurance benefits rise with previous earnings. Optimal insurance is incomplete even though disability risks are exogenous and verifiable so that moral hazard in disability insurance is absent. Imperfect insurance is optimal because it encourages workers to insure themselves against disability by working and saving more, thereby alleviating the distortionary impact of the redistributive income tax on labor supply and savings.     

Disability,social inclusion and the marketing of tourist attractions

The participation of persons with a disability (PWDs) in tourism has received growing academic interest in recent years. This paper contributes to a reflection on how accessible tourism relates to the sustainable development paradigm. To investigate this relationship, it goes beyond the question of PWDs’ access to tourism services, and adopts an inclusiveness perspective. Inclusion is examined in terms of legislation, marketing and imagery, and representations of PWDs as consumers embedded within social units – and families in particular. These dimensions are explored empirically in a study of visitor attractions in Cornwall (England) based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of brochures and websites. The study shows that the marketing materials of Cornish visitor attractions mainly focus on access, and the imagery used largely projects quasi invisibility or provides ambiguous messages. Communication with PWDs rarely addresses the family unit, making the family tourism experience intangible in the pre-trip phase. These results point at weaker implementation of inclusiveness, which corroborates previous findings of watered down definitions of rights to tourism under neo-liberal ideologies and economic crises. The paper discusses implications for social inclusion and highlights avenues for future research.     

The embodied tourist experiences of people with vision impairment: Management implications beyond the visual gaze

This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study that investigated the embodied tourist experiences of 40 people who are vision impaired. The study, informed by the concept of “embodied ontology”, explored the corporeal and socially constructed experience of tourism. The findings highlighted the benefit of holidays for the participants and de-centred the “visual gaze” in the tourist experience. The quality of the tourist experience related to participants’ feelings of inclusion or exclusion in terms of their access to information, experience of wayfinding, travelling with a guide dog, and the knowledge and attitudes of others. It was evident that participants needed to manage their tourist experiences closely and constantly. The paper concludes that the tourism industry and community must understand the multi-sensory nature of the tourist experience if quality accessible experiences are to be available for tourists with vision impairment. Provision of multi-sensory experiences also enhances the experiences of sighted tourists.     

The influence of trade union Disability Champions on employer disability policy and practice

Disability Champions are a new type of lay workplace trade union activist, whose role is to encourage employers to audit and improve disability policies and offer independent advice and guidance on disability issues to employees. Drawing on a survey of the population of Disability Champions, this article assesses Disability Champion influence on employer disability policy and practice. While the majority of Disability Champions report having had a positive impact, they report greater influence on employer willingness to conduct disability audits and to amend and improve employer equal opportunities practices with regard to disability than employer willingness to make reasonable adjustments. The analysis also identifies several factors that are likely to be important in improving Disability Champion effectiveness. Overall, the results suggest Disability Champions have the potential to enhance the ability of unions to represent disabled people and help manage disability issues within the workplace. The article makes a theoretical contribution to Disability Champion roles by further developing the ‘Activity‐Support‐Characteristic’ framework for the antecedents of new union representatives' effectiveness.     

Influencing factors of disability among the elderly in China, 2003–2016: application of Bayesian quantile regression

Abstract

Background: More and more disabled elderly need long-term care as China becomes an aging society. In 2016, there were 220 million people over the age of 60, and nearly 10 million completely disabled elderly people who cannot complete Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Therefore, the topic of influencing factors for disability among the elderly in China has attracted close attention from researchers, most of which use the traditional empirical methods, such as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and logistic.

Objective: The purpose of this paper was to introduce the Bayesian Quantile Regression (BQR) method to the topic of the disabled elderly, which was achieved by using BQR to study the influencing factors of disability among the elderly in China during 2003–2016.

Methods: This paper was the first attempt to use the BQR for the influencing factors of disability among the elderly in China. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the regression results of BQR, OLS, Quantile Regression (QR), and Bayesian Linear Regression (BLR).

Results: It was found that there was a relatively stable relationship between chronic diseases and disability, although there was a little difference in different quantiles. In addition, the BQR can obtain results similar to the traditional method. For instance, the coefficient of chronic diseases (to total disability) obtained by OLS, QR, and BLR were basically consistent (around 0.778), which was similar to BQR. The BQR not only provided estimates for all the quantiles, but also provided upper and lower values of a certain confidence interval.

Conclusions: By applying the BQR to the influencing factors of disability among the elderly in China, we reached the conclusion that BQR methods are adaptable for this research topic because of their characteristics and advantages over the traditional methods, such as less strict constraints, the estimates for all quantiles, and the combination of historical information with prior information. Moreover, the BQR method appropriately obtained the lower and upper values in a confidence interval, which can provide prediction space for the future.     

Job satisfaction and disability: lower expectations about jobs or a matter of health?

This article focuses on the analysis of the reported differentials of job satisfaction for disabled and non-disabled individuals. Using the Spanish data of the European Community Household Panel during the period 1995–2001, we estimate a job satisfaction equation for each group and evaluate job satisfaction differentials through the Oaxaca-Blinder methodology. The results show that disabled individuals are more likely to be more satisfied in their jobs than non-disabled ones, but only after controlling for other variables. Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows the greater importance of the returns in job satisfaction for disabled people, which is supported by explanations based on the lower expectations about jobs of disadvantaged groups.      

Labor supply and government programs: A cross-country analysis

There are substantial cross-country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle (age 50+). A theory of labor supply and retirement decisions is developed to quantitatively assess the role of social security, disability insurance, and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply late in the life cycle across European countries and the United States. The findings support the view that government policies can go a long way towards accounting for the low labor supply late in the life cycle in the European countries relative to the United States, with social security rules accounting for the bulk of these effects.