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Yin N and Heiland F

occupation and to still qualify to receive benefits. It perhaps would foster a culture of
continued attachment to the labor force among people with work limitations in the U.S.
and then implant among the general public an idea that work and disability are not
necessarily mutually exclusive. In time, that idea would likely affect the way that the
public perceives and classifies disability. For example, the general public, who used
to call milder health problems “no disability”, would now define them as “mild” or
“moderate” disability, as suggested by the simulation result.
In the last graph, we pool together several policy dimensions (minimum disability
level, sickness benefit and unemployment benefit) because they are highly correlated
and represent the eligibilities for less severe disability cases. Depending on the
specific rules in a country, a worker struck by milder work limitations could apply for
unemployment benefits, relatively short-term sickness benefits, or some lower level of
disability benefits from the public disability program. Our simulation shows that a one-
unit increase in the generosity score summarizing these policy aspects, that is, in terms
of the systems awarding lower level of disability, would increase the rate of reporting
moderate disabilities by 1.3 to 3.1 percentage points and lower the rate of reporting no
disability by 1.8 to 2.6 percentage points.

4 Discussion
Disability programs are a substantial and rising component of public social
expenditures and an important dimension of the social safety net in many developed
countries. A large literature has focused on estimating the effects of disability policy
generosity on people’s behavior, such as labor market participation and disability
benefit claiming. In this paper, we try to understand how differences in the disability
institutional arrangements affects the general public’s views about work disability, an
aspect that has received little attention before in disability policy studies.
We first use an anchoring vignette approach to study the role of response scale
heterogeneity. We find evidence that, compared to their European counterparts,
Americans apply a less inclusive scale to their assessment of work limitations, i.e., they
are less inclined to see a given condition as work limiting. The results are consistent
with Kapteyn et al. (2007) who found Dutch respondents have lower thresholds in
reporting work disability than American respondents. We further explore the possible
mechanisms for disability reporting heterogeneity among countries. We show that the
different reporting styles could be linked to the generosity of disability policies. For
example, the less inclusive disability rating styles among Americans than Europeans
are associated with the stricter disability policies in the U.S. compared to the European
countries. Previous research that utilizes vignette data to study disability reporting
heterogeneity has paid little attention to understanding the underlying mechanisms of
the observed reporting differences across countries. The two exceptions that have paid
attention to the mechanisms either find insignificant effects (Angelini, Cavapozzi and
Paccagnella (2012) who have attributed reporting differences to variations in public
disability expenditures across countries) or do not formally model the mechanisms
(Kapteyn, Smith and van Soest (2009) who have linked reporting differences to work
norms across countries).
Our counterfactual policy simulation results suggest an overall positive correlation
between disability policy generosity and disability reporting. That is, more lenient
disability policies are associated with higher likelihood of reporting disabilities.
Different policy dimensions affect the disability classifications in different ways, and
the most influential policy dimensions in affecting disability reporting are the policy
coverage, medical assessment, and vocational assessment. Specifically, more extensive
policy coverage is associated with significantly more reporting of mild disability and
less reporting of no disability. More lenient vocational assessments are predicted to
result in substantial increases in reporting of moderate and severe disabilities and much
less reporting of no disability. Medical assessment does not have such monotonic
effects over the disability severity distribution. More relaxed medical assessment

International Journal of Population Studies 2017, Volume 3, Issue 1 59