Using data from the 1978 Survey of Disability and Work and the 1992 Health and Retirement Study, we test the importance of accommodation and other policy variables on the timing of application for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits following the onset of a work-limiting condition. We correct for choice-based sampling in the Survey of Disability and Work by extending the Manski and Lerman (1977) correction to the likelihood function of our continuous time hazard model, we find that this correction significantly affects the results. Similar findings emerge from these two data sets. Accommodation significantly reduces the speed of application and more generous benefits increase the speed of applying for SSDI.

Richard V. Burkhauser is Chair of the Department of Policy Analysis and Management and the Sarah Gibson Blanding Professor of Policy Analysis at Cornell University; J. S. Butler is Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University; Yang-Woo Kim is an Economist with the Bank of Korea; and Robert R. Weathers II is a Research Associate in the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. This study was funded by the National Institute on Aging, Program Project #1-PO1-AGO9743-01, "The Well-Being of the Elderly in a Comparative Context. " Part of Kim's time spent on this work was financed by a research award from the Arthritis Foundation. The authors thank George A. Slotsve, Kathryn H. Anderson, Theodore P. Pincus, and an anonymous referee for careful readings on earlier drafts of this paper and Brent Kreider for supplying us with his data file from the 1978 Survey of Disability and Work. Permission to use the restricted Health and Retirement Study data in this paper was granted to us by the HRS overseers at the University of Michigan. All SDW data and HRS data that are not restricted will be available six months after the date of publication from Richard V. Burkhauser, Cornell University, N134 MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4401. The SAS programs used to construct expected earnings and Primary Insurance Amounts from the restricted data will also be made available. Rules for obtaining the HRS restricted data are available from the HRS website at http:\\www.umich.edu\~hrswww.