SITE Seminar | The time cost of a disability

Join us for the next SITE Seminar! On March 18, 2025, Michał Myck (Centre for Economic Analysis - CenEA) will present a working paper on "The Time Cost of a Disability", co-authored with Daniel S. Hamermesh. The study examines how physical disabilities alter time use, leading to a loss of activity variety and increased time pressure. Findings from multiple countries, including the U.S., Poland, Italy, and Spain, reveal that individuals with disabilities engage in significantly fewer activities, with economic costs equivalent to as much as $240,000 per year.

Start time: 2025-03-18 at 12:00

End time: 2025-03-18 at 13:00

Time zone: CET

Location: SITE library, 9th floor, at SSE and online via Zoom

Working paper title: The Time Cost of a Disability

By: Daniel S. Hamermesh (University of Texas at Austin, IZA, and NBER) & Michał Myck (Centre for Economic Analysis - CenEA, and IZA)

Abstract

We consider how a physical disability alters patterns of time use. A disability may raise the time cost of all activities; of some—making them differentially less worth doing; or it may make switching activities more costly. The first yields no predictions about time use, but the latter two possibilities both predict that fewer activities will be undertaken, with more time spent on each. These explanations describe our findings based on non-working ATUS 2008-22 respondents ages 70+, 32% of whom self-assess a disability. Data from the Polish Time Use Survey, where disability is medically certified, show similar results; and they demonstrate the same loss of variety over multiple days. Remarkably similar results are found using Italian and Spanish data, which also demonstrate that having a disability leads to much greater feelings of being rushed for time. Using Polish data we find that a husband responds to his own and his wife’s disability with the same reduction in variety; in contrast a wife enjoys less variety if she has a disability but does more different things if her husband is disabled. Overall, a mobility/physical disability leads an otherwise identical person to engage in over 10 percent fewer activities on a typical day. The lost variety and the additional time pressure represent extra costs equivalent, in the U.S., Polish, and Spanish data to as much as $240,000 per year.

About the speaker

Michał Myck, Director of the the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA).

Michał Myck is Director and Member of the Board of CenEA. He previously worked at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (1999-2004; International Fellow 2005-2011) and at the DIW-Berlin (2005-2013). In years 2005-2017 he was the Polish Country Team Leader for the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).

He received his B.A. (First Class) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford (1997) and an M.Phil. degree in Economics at the University of Oxford (1999). In March 2006 he received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Warsaw. He completed his habilitation in June 2015 at the School of Business and Economics of the Freie Universität Berlin (Privatdozent until December 2018). He is currently associated as Privatdozent with Universität Greifswald. He is a Research Fellow at IZA Bonn and regularly cooperates with the World Bank.

His research has focused on modelling of labour market behaviour and on the implications of labour market regulations on employment and retirement decisions. He has studied the effectiveness of tax and benefit systems and worked on issues related to measurement of poverty and income inequality. He published in such journals as American Economic Journal – Economic Policy, Journal of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine, Labour Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Economics of Transition, Fiscal Studies, Oxford Review of Economic Policy and Review of Economics of the Household.

For the list of his publications in RePEc see: RePEc and in Google Scholar see: Google Scholar

e-mail: mmyck@cenea.org.pl