At the time of disability onset, the effect of disability insurance on earnings is limited by the finding that work-prevented respondents, who account for the majority of benefit claims, have negligible earnings regardless of application status.

This study bounds the potential earnings of accepted disability applicants by the post-application earnings of rejected applicants. Compositional differences between the two groups are addressed using a reweighting estimator. As shown, the bound on earnings is similar regardless of weighting.