【主讲】Serena Rhee Assistant professor (Univ. of Hawaii)
【主题】Measuring the Effects of Employment Protection for the Disabled: Theory and Evidence from the Americans with Disabilities Act
【时间】2016年3月22日 (周二) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼801室
【语言】英文
【摘要】Despite the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, labor market outcomes of the disabled in the United States have been deteriorating for the past 20 years. We analytically prove that these facts are easy to reconcile with our economic theory where firms perceive this employment protection law as additional costs (e.g., the costs accompanying mandated accommodation and expected legal disputes). The optimal job creation decision of the firm implies that the job finding rate of the disabled decreases in equilibrium under the ADA, as firms have more incentives not to hire the disabled and avoid these added costs. A firm's hiring response to employment protection intensifies with the productivity difference across health groups and the share of the disabled in labor markets. We conduct an empirical analysis using state-level variation in pre-ADA employment protection laws to verify the model's predictions. Consistent with our theory, the disabled in states with weaker initial labor protection laws experienced a significantly larger decline in the labor force participation rate and an increase in the exit rate from the employment to the out-of-labor forces after the introduction of the ADA.
