Work from Home and Disability Employment
A 1 percentage point increase in work from home increases full-time employment by 1.0% for individuals with a physical disability. The post-pandemic increase in working from home explains 68%-85% of the rise in full-time employment among people with a physical disability. (Bloom, Dahl & Rooth, NBER)
Disability-Based Labour Market Inequalities
ETUI working paper (Pettinicchio & Maroto, 2024) reviewing the earnings and employment disparities faced by people with disabilities across countries. People with disabilities are disproportionately affected by economic downturns and the Covid-19 pandemic, which in the United Kingdom reversed a narrowing employment gap. In the United States, unions contributed to an earnings boost of 30% for workers with disabilities, and the authors argue unions must work proactively for disadvantaged groups.
A Study on the Employment and Wage Outcomes of People with Disabilities
Across 30 countries with wage data, employees with disabilities earn 12 per cent less per hour than those without; three quarters of this gap is not explained by education, age or occupation. In low- and lower-middle-income countries the gap reaches 26 per cent.
The Disability Employment Puzzle: A Field Experiment on Employer Hiring Behavior
2015 field experiment: applications to 6,016 advertised accounting positions found that applicants disclosing a disability received 26% fewer expressions of employer interest. The gap was concentrated among private companies with fewer than 15 employees, which are not covered by the ADA; publicly held firms showed no statistically significant gap.