Promoting employment of disabled women in Spain; Evaluating a policy

Even though the Disability System in Spain is designed to allow partially disabled individuals to combine the receipt of the benefits with a job, their employment rates have remained very low since 1996. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the results of an employment promotion policy introduced in Spain in 2004 which increased the deductions to the Social Security contributions paid by employers that hired disabled women. We apply difference-in-difference models and estimate a recursive bivariate probit model to evaluate the existence of shifts in employment trends in the women relative to the men sample conditioning on the existence of preexisting trends. We find that the impact of the policy is significant and we estimate an average elasticity of employment of 0.14 for partially and of 0.08 for totally disabled women relative to the deductions in the employer Social Security contributions. Finally, when we extrapolate the results beyond our sample, we estimate that 7100 disabled women were able to find a job in Spain due to the policy with an associated cost of 10,997.900 euro for the government. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.