Does a parent’s illness or disability hurt the educational attainment of their children? This dissertation consists of three essays on the impact of negative health events / activity limitation experienced by parents on their children’s human capital, and how the negative consequences of parental illness can be mediated by public policy. The first essay uses the 1991-2006 Chinese Health and Nutrition Survey and finds poor Chinese children whose parent has a serious illness are much more likely to drop out of primary or secondary school compared to other children whose parents remain healthy. The second essay, using Canada’s 1994-2008 NLSCY, discovers a similar “attendance gap” at the post-secondary level between Canadian youth of disabled parents and their peers of non-disabled parents. Finally, the third essay demonstrates that higher cash transfers made available to parents with a disability can boost children’s math test performance and facilitate non-cognitive skill development.

Thesis advisor: R. Shep Melnick / This paper's main focus is on the American Disability Insurance law. It begins with an outline of the debate that led up to the passing of the original legislation. The paper then examines the law more closely and depicts the changes the law has undergone in the last 50+ years. Next, the current disability benefits process is depicted and questions are posed about inherent difficulties in the disability insurance program. The paper then examines the challenges mental disability causes for the disability insurance program, using a case study of bipolar disorder. Disability insurance programs abroad are next explored with a focus on how other countries have dealt with the problems the United States is facing in its own program. The paper concludes with an examination of the future prospects of the American Disability Insurance program; suggestions are made regarding useful changes to the law. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Many countries have reduced the generosity of disability benefits while making them more activating - yet few studies have examined how employment rates have subsequently changed. We present estimates of how the employment rates of older workers with poor health in 13 high-income countries changed between 2004-7 and 2012-15 using HRS/SHARE/ELSA data. We find that those in poor health in the USA have experienced a unique deterioration: they have not only seen a widening gap to the employment rates of those with good health, but their employment rates fell per se. We find only for Sweden (and possibly England) signs that the health employment gap shrank. We then examine possible explanations for the development in the USA: we find no evidence it links to labour market trends, but possible links to the USA's lack of disability benefit reform - which should be considered alongside the wider challenges of our findings for policymakers. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This thesis focuses on the dynamics of benefit receipt in the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) using individual-level administrative data from 2003 to 2013. This thesis is comprised of three self-contained essays. The first essay examines the dynamics of disability benefit receipt in Ontario. A five-year cohort analysis is carried out for those who first received disability benefits in any year between 2004 and 2009 to estimate the proportion exiting from such benefits within five years of first benefit receipt. This analysis is extended to type of exit (e.g., died, moved, or disqualified) and nature of exit (e.g., sustained or temporary). We find that only about 18 percent of benefit recipients exit, most within one and a half years of initial benefit receipt, and that more than one-third of those who exit return within five years. Recipients are both less likely to exit and more likely to return if single, divorced, or widowed rather than married or living common law, if they have children, or if they have mental rather than physical disabilities. The second essay identifies factors that influence ODSP benefits duration. We employ a flexible parametric technique to investigate the duration of disability benefit receipt. We also employ cure models to account for the proportion of recipients that never exit ODSP over the ten-year sample period. Of the whole sample, 20 percent of recipients completed a first spell and the remaining 80 percent were right censored. We find that time spent receiving ODSP benefits is negatively associated with education and positively associated with both age and severity of disability. Individuals who are single, divorced, separated, widowed, or immigrants have longer benefit spells as compared to those who are married, common law, and Canadian born. Individuals with children also spend longer time on ODSP than those relative without children. We provide evidence that recipient characteristics are associated with different probabilities of exiting or re-entering ODSP; that suggests that differentiated, and not ‘one size fit all’, policies are required to facilitate transitions from program dependence to economic independence. The third essay analyzes differences in the benefit receipt rates by immigration status and age. A flexible parametric duration analysis is employed to investigate how age at entry into benefits interacted with immigration status and, for immigrants, how age at arrival in Canada affects the exit rate from disability support. We find strong evidence of differences in age-dependence of benefit receipt and exit rates across immigration status categories. At younger (18-34) and middle (35-54) ages the Canadian-born have much higher benefit receipt rates than immigrants but lower rates at older (55 and over) ages. We speculate that the difference at younger and middle ages can be explained largely by the “healthy immigrant effect” (i.e., a selection effect of relatively healthier immigrants) and at older ages by differential eligibility for, and expected income from, alternative benefit programs such as the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Approximately 4.2 million Canadian adults suffer from a physical or psychological disability, of whom up to 30% suffer from depression. Those receiving disability benefits versus those not receiving benefits may be at greater risk of unsatisfactory outcomes because their circumstances or psychological status may interfere with successful implementation of standard therapies. This thesis addresses the effectiveness of therapies for depression in patients receiving disability benefits, using an individual patient data meta-analysis of all published randomized controlled trials evaluating Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and a secondary analysis of an administrative database from a large, private, Canadian insurer. Additionally, this thesis addresses an important methodological issue: assessing the impact of missing participant data for continuous outcomes in systematic reviews. Missing participant data may bias results of individual trials or systematic reviews of individual trials if participants with missing data have different expected outcomes from those with available data. No methods have been proposed for investigating the extent to which missing participant data for continuous outcomes might bias the results of systematic reviews, and this dissertation addresses that gap.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)