Should We Let Employers Decide Who Can Return to Work After Being Sick? Lessons From Belgium's Reintegration Trajectories

Research highlights the benefits of workplace accommodations for job retention, yet many eligible workers lack adequate support. Existing studies focus primarily on worker-side incentives, leaving employer-side factors largely unexplored. This paper examines the impact of employer discretion in selecting Disability Insurance (DI) recipients for Reintegration Trajectories (RTs), a program aimed at promoting work resumption through workplace adaptations and employer involvement. Exploiting a 2018 policy change in Belgium, we use a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to estimate its causal effects. Employer-selected participants are 13.1 percentage points less likely to resume work and 19.7 percentage points more likely to remain in DI. Employers tend to select older participants with longer disability durations, often leading to unsuccessful trajectories. In contrast, an event study shows that trajectories initiated by the medical advisor significantly accelerate work resumption among DI recipients.