Does Having a Severe Disability Lead to Decreased Socialization Opportunities at Work? Causal Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach

Stigmatizing labels have detrimental effects for affected persons’ social support networks. We transfer this finding to the employment of persons with disabilities. Specifically, we use the regression discontinuity design (RDD) to test the proposition that individuals officially labeled as severely disabled (holders of a severe disability identification card) experience less socialization opportunities at work than their counterparts with a similarly severe disability but without the label. We draw a sample of 512 persons registered as disabled from a large data set representative of the German workforce (N = 8,019). As expected, being a holder of a severe disability identification card causes decreased socialization opportunities at work. Furthermore, the absence of differences between treated and control observations in multiple observable characteristics (e.g., demographics, job type, health) near the known threshold strengthens our case for using the RDD. In addition, since our study sample stems from population representative data, we examine the effect of interest over and above the effect of persons’ actual occupation. This, in turn, considerably strengthens the external validity of our study results.