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Employers and Persons with Disabilities: Economic and Legal Barriers to Increasing Employment of SSA Beneficiaries and ApplicantsPrincipal Investigators: Elizabeth Powers and Nicholas Powers Project Type: Core Research Project Year: 04 Thematic Category: Return to Work Project Summary: This project seeks to improve understanding of the employer perspective on hiring SSA beneficiaries and applicants, as well as workers with disabilities generally. The approach is multidisciplinary, applying insights from analyses of the complex legal environment governing employee-employer relations to analyses of specific economic issues. The overarching objectives of this project are to identify the important barriers to hiring workers with disabilities from the employer perspective; to identify and provide some evidence on major perceived employee concerns as they pertain to persons with disabilities; and to identify a range of policy options for reducing employer barriers to hiring persons with disabilities. The project will provide an overview of SSA programs and major laws governing the treatment of persons with disabilities in hiring, employment, compensation, and termination and identify how these provisions, along with other factors, potentially affect employers' incentives to hire and retain persons with disabilities. The evolution of the relevant case law affecting employer-employee relations within the realm of disability will be studied. A particular focus will be the Americans with Disabilities Act. Researchers will synthesize this information to reveal where the courts "draw the line" on issues such as reasonable accommodation, and how these lines vary over time and across different types of employers and workers. The importance of specific barriers to employing workers with disabilities from the employer perspective will be evaluated through literature review and by conducting original empirical analyses. The empirical work will focus on employer health costs and employer responses to the ADA. The prior analysis of underlying case law will aid the development of new hypotheses--which the researchers will test-about how employers have responded to the Act. |
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