Abstract
We evaluate the impact of a mandatory quota of workers with disabilities using a sharp regression discontinuity design. We use data from a panel of Spanish firms where there is a mandatory quota of 2 % for firms with 50 or more workers. Non-parametric estimations show that strictly beyond the cut off of 50 workers there is an increase of 1.4 points in the percentage of workers with disabilities in the firm, just fulfilling the quota of 2 %. However, this effect has some lack of precision. In addition, for larger firm’s sizes the variation in the percentage of workers with disabilities is likely related with differences in firms’ characteristics.
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- 1.
The employment quota in Austria works as an implicit tax on hiring not disabled workers if a worker with disabilities is required by the law. The Austrian quota system obliges firms to hire one person with disabilities per 25 not disabled workers. Firms that do not comply with this obligation are subject to a tax of currently €213 per month and not hired disabled worker (Wuellrich 2010).
- 2.
These certificates are obtained from the Public Administration.
- 3.
Notice that firms using alternative measures to the employment quota are not fulfilling the 2 % quota (and because of that, they use alternative measures). Therefore, the only way to evaluate the impact of employment quota is using only firms not using anything consider as an alternative measure. Of course, an interesting research question would be to focus on firms using alternative measures. However, because of the design of the questionnaire, we only know that firms are using different options considered as alternative to the quota by the legal regulation but we do not know why they are using such measures. For example, many firms can be using the services of a Sheltered Employment Centre because they provide a good service or because it was included as part of a strategy of social involvement of the firm. Anyway, the main objective of this article consists of estimating the impact of the mandatory employment quota on employment of people with disabilities and not the strict compliance of the legal regulation by firms either hiring people with disabilities or using alternative measures.
- 4.
- 5.
The econometric details of the ‘rd’ command are explained in Nichols (2007).
- 6.
The default bandwidth of the command ‘rd’ is based on Fuji et al. (2009) to minimize MSE, or squared bias plus variance, in a sharp RD design.
- 7.
Usually, applied researchers include covariates in RDD estimations. However, notice that as ‘unconfoundedness’ is granted around the threshold of the assignment variable covariates should be redundant as treated and non-treated individuals would be as randomly selected considering any observable and not observable variable (Imbens and Lemieux 2008; Lee and Lemieux 2010). However, covariates are included to control some remaining heterogeneity for some variables especially relevant. Anyway, covariates should not have a discontinuity around the threshold (Lee and Lemieux 2010). Using graphs, as usual, we have checked that the continuity assumption is plausible with our covariates. They are available upon request.
- 8.
This amount corresponds to the workers with disabilities hired strictly thanks to the quota system in firms with 50, 51 and 52 workers.
- 9.
We have used the micro-data of the specialized survey on disabilities for these calculations. The micro-data of this survey (in Spanish, Encuesta sobre Discapacidades, Autonomía personal y situaciones de Dependencia de 2008, in short EDAD-2008) are freely available from the Spanish Statistical Office (http://www.ine.es). The use of the micro-data allowed us to estimate fully comparable figures using the administrative definition of disability (as in the ECL). Thanks to the rich information of the micro-data about disability, we have estimated all figures on people with disabilities strictly for those having a disability certificate with at least 33 % of disability in order to have homogeneous information from both sources.
- 10.
According to the survey EDAD-2008, there were 46,100 persons with disabilities working in the Public Administration in 2008.
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Acknowledgments
The data used in this study were provided by the Social and Labour Statistics Office from the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Affairs. We are indebted to the staff of this Office for her assistance with our requests. Of course, this public institution is not responsible for opinions and analyses presented in this manuscript. This paper was presented at the IX Spanish Congress on Labour Economics in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (July 7–8, 2011) and the XXVII AIEL Conference held in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Italy (September 27–28, 2012). All remaining errors are the authors’ own responsibility.
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Malo, M.Á., Pagán, R. (2014). Hiring Workers with Disabilities When a Quota Requirement Exists: The Relevance of Firm’s Size. In: Malo, M., Sciulli, D. (eds) Disadvantaged Workers. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04376-0_4
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