New paper: "Intergenerational Spillovers in Disability Insurance"

Intergenerational Spillovers in Disability Insurance


by Gordon B. Dahl, Anne C. Gielen  -  #24296 (CH LS PE)

Does participation in a social assistance program by parents have
spillovers on their children's own participation, future labor
market attachment, and human capital investments? While
intergenerational concerns have figured prominently in policy
debates for decades, causal evidence is scarce due to nonrandom
participation and data limitations.  In this paper we exploit a
1993 policy reform in the Netherlands which tightened disability
insurance (DI) criteria for existing claimants, and use rich
panel data to link parents to children's long-run outcomes.  The
key to our regression discontinuity design is that the reform
applied to younger cohorts, while older cohorts were exempted
from the new rules.  We find that children of parents who were
pushed out of DI or had their benefits reduced are 11% less
likely to participate in DI themselves, do not alter their use of
other government safety net programs, and earn 2% more in the
labor market as adults.  The combination of reduced government
transfers and increased tax revenue results in a fiscal gain of
5,900 euros per treated parent due to child spillovers by 2014. 
Moreover, children of treated parents complete an extra 0.12
years of schooling on average, an investment consistent with an
anticipated future with less reliance on DI.  Our findings have
important implications for the evaluation of this and other
policy reforms:  ignoring parent-to-child spillovers understates
the long-run cost savings of the Dutch reform by between 21 and
40% in present discounted value terms.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w24296?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw