ABSTRACT
What innovations in social policy would help increase employment for people with mental illness? Econometric labor-supply models (Burtless and Hausman, 1978; Moffit, 1990) can be used to forecast the effects of disability pension policy changes on people with mental disability. Such models require the collection of data on work and income from a sample that is large enough to provide examples of people in each defined category of “budget constraint.” To apply this method, econometrist Susan Averett, and the author (Averett et al., 1999), gathered economic information from over 200 randomly selected people with psychotic disorders in treatment with the mental health center in Boulder, Colorado.
