Reaserch

Abstract 

Research highlights the benefits of workplace accommodations for job retention, yet many eligible workers lack adequate support. Existing studies focus primarily on worker-side incentives, leaving employer-side factors largely unexplored. This paper examines the impact of employer discretion in selecting Disability Insurance (DI) recipients for Reintegration Trajectories (RTs), a program aimed at promoting work resumption through workplace adaptations and employer involvement. Exploiting a 2018 policy change in Belgium, we use a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to estimate its causal effects. Employer-selected participants are 13.1 percentage points less likely to resume work and 19.7 percentage points more likely to remain in DI. Employers tend to select older participants with longer disability durations, often leading to unsuccessful trajectories. In contrast, an event study shows that trajectories initiated by the medical advisor significantly accelerate work resumption among DI recipients. 

Abstract 

Social security systems feature complex tax and benefit rules and offer limited individualized counseling. This complexity restricts the ability of social policies to reach their intended populations. We distinguish between awareness of rules (general, static information) and computational complexity (personalized, interactive information) and test their respective roles in transmitting financial work incentives. We develop an online benefit simulator and evaluate its impact in a randomized field experiment. Providing general information does not affect behavior, whereas reducing computational complexity through the simulator increases re-employment among social security claimants by 2.5% after one year. Personalization appears more effective than salience in complex policy environments, highlighting the high potential returns to digital tools in social insurance.