The Effects of Disability on Labor Force Status in Australia

New on SSRN: Roger Wilkins, The Effects of Disability on Labour Force Status in Australia, 37 Australian Econ. Rev. 359 (2004). The abstract:

Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics 1998 Survey of
Disability, Ageing and Carers, this study examines the effects
of disability on four labour market outcomes: not in the labour
force, unemployed, part-time employed and full-time employed.
The detailed information on health available in the dataset also
facilitates investigation of the dependence of effects on the
characteristics of the disability, including severity,
impairment type and age of onset. Disability is found to have
substantial effects on labour force status, on average acting to
decrease the probability of labour force participation by
one-quarter for males and one-fifth for females. For males, the
decrease in fulltime employment accounts for almost all of the
decrease in labour force participation associated with
disability; for females, disability has negative effects on both
full-time and part-time employment. Analysis of disability
characteristics shows that adverse effects on labour force
status are increasing in the severity of the disability and are
also worse for those with more than one type of impairment and
for those who experience disability onset at older ages. There
is evidence that the adverse effects of disability are lower for
males who completed their education after the onset of the
disability.