Disabilities, shared capitalism, and wealth: evidence from health and retirement survey

Does shared capitalism help to mitigate the economic effects of disability? Employee ownership and profit sharing are linked to higher incomes and wealth for workers, while disability is strongly linked to lower incomes, but there has been no prior research on their overlapping effects. Using household-level panel data from Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) restricted to households with at least one earner, we provide exploratory results on the relationships among disability, shared capitalism, and wealth. We find that: 1) disability households have lower mean and median wealth (one-third to one-half lower than non-disability households using the most comprehensive disability measure); 2) disability households are less likely to participate in shared capitalism (only three-fourths as likely as non-disability households using the most comprehensive disability measure); 3) shared capitalism is linked to a greater increase in wealth for disability households than for non-disability households, but disability wealth gaps remain even when shared capitalism is available. While we cannot make strong causal claims, these findings suggest that shared capitalism may play a positive role in wealth-building for people both with and without disabilities, and help to mitigate some of the economic disadvantages faced by people with disabilities.