Who cares? A Counterfactual Analysis of Household Work Intensity in Households with Disabled Family Members

Disability policy has been dominated by two views, namely the medical and the social model. Employment policies stemming from these two models differ substantially. Yet, both models share an exclusive focus on the disabled individual and his labour market integration. Recent developments in labour market studies show that a household perspective offers new insights in the relationship between employment outcomes and social inequality. In this paper we argue that the dominant focus on individual employment of the current models falls short in depicting the full picture. We apply the notion of household work intensity and apply a polarization index to examine the distribution of employment over households with disabled family members, using EU-SILC data for 2005–2009. We find that the success of disability-related employment policies depend to a large extent on which unit of interest, i.e., the disabled individual or the household, is taken into account. More jobless households exist than would be expected in the case employment was randomly distributed. This reveals that the low employment rates of disabled household members only partially explain the low household work intensity. Shared socio-demographic traits have a mixed effect in explaining the excess joblessness. A more complex framework is therefore needed to account for household level mechanisms that influence household work intensity in families with disabled members.