The U.S. disability system is failing--growing at an unsustainable pace for taxpayers and delivering relatively poor outcomes to those with disabilities.

Although industrialized nations have long provided public protection to working-age individuals with disabilities, the form has changed over time. The impetus for change has been multi-faceted: rapid growth in program costs; greater awareness that people with impairments are able and willing to...

A new and highly controversial literature argues that the employment of working-age people with disabilities fell dramatically relative to the rest of the working-age population in the 1990s. Some dismiss these results as fundamentally flawed because they come from a self-reported work...

Data constraints make the long-term monitoring of the working-age population with disabilities a difficult task. Indeed, the Current Population Survey (CPS) is the only national data source that offers detailed work and income questions and consistently asked measures of disability over a...

In general, our examination suggests that in the absence of a universal guaranteed income program for all Americans, the operational flexibility of the categorical eligibility criteria for SSI has made the program sensitive to both downturns in the business cycle and to increases in the pool of...

SSI was established in 1972, born out of a compromise at the time between those wanting to provide a guaranteed income floor and those wishing to limit it to individuals not expected to work: the aged, blind, and disabled. SSI is now the largest federal means-tested program in the United States,...