Measuring the Value of Disability Insurance from Take-Up Decisions

Author: Andreas Haller (Norwegian School of Economics)Stefan Staubli (University of Calgary)
Posted: 2 July 2026

Abstract

The central trade-off for designing Disability Insurance (DI) is between providing insurance to those in need while maintaining incentives to work. This paper develops a novel revealed-preference approach to identify the insurance value of DI benefits. We show that comparing the DI take-up response to a change in benefits versus a change in wages identifies the insurance value. Implementing our framework in Canada, we estimate that increasing DI benefits by $1 creates an additional disincentive cost of $0.60 but creates an insurance value of $2.20. Thus, our approach suggests that DI benefits are not overly generous in the Canadian context.
JEL codes: H53; H55; J14; J21
Keywords: Disability insurance, take-up, benefits, policy reform