An evaluation of the 1987 French Disabled Workers Act: better paying than hiring

This paper presents the first evaluation of the French Disabled Workers Act of 1987, which aimed to promote the employment of disabled people in the private sector. We use a panel data set, which includes both the health and the labour market histories of workers. We account both for unobserved heterogeneity and for the change in the disabled population over time. We find that the law had a negative impact on the employment of disabled workers in the private sector. This counterproductive effect likely comes from the possibility to pay a fine instead of hiring disabled workers.