ArticleScandinavian journal of work, environment & health2022
The impact of vocational rehabilitation on employment outcomes: A regression discontinuity approach.
Article in Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- From Arrow to evidence: health economics and occupational health in the Nordic context.Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health · 2026Article
- Prevalence and associated factors of chronic pain among nurses: a national cross-sectional study.BMC nursing · 2025Article
- When will we have enough evidence to require improvements at the workplace?Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health · 2024Article
- Article
- Impact of a Finnish reform adding new sickness absence checkpoints on rehabilitation and labor market outcomes: an interrupted time series analysis.Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesSince 2015, Finnish disability pension applicants who are rejected or receive a short-term temporary pension have, under certain conditions, also received a preliminary decision for vocational rehabilitation (VR). A key requirement for eligibility is a certain amount of earnings during the previous five years (€34 910.29 in 2017). We exploit this discontinuity to examine the impact of assignment to VR on labor market outcomes.
methodsAll new disability pension applicants from 2015 to 2017 were included. Fuzzy regression discontinuity design was used to evaluate the impact of assignment to VR on employment, unemployment and earned income two years later among those close to the threshold (+/- €20 000) providing eligibility for the preliminary decision. Arguably, those just below and just above the earnings limit are similar to each other, allowing causal interpretation of the estimates.
resultsFor each of the employment outcomes, we found a modest effect in the expected direction at the income threshold, but there is considerable uncertainty in these findings. On average, exceeding the income limit increased the probability of employment by 7.6 percentage points, but the estimate was far from statistical significance. Unemployment became slightly less common and earned income slightly increased, but the estimates were also clearly statistically non-significant.
conclusionsWe found no consistent evidence of the impact of assignment to VR on employment outcomes among low-income disability pension applicants. However, given the narrow and specific study population, this should not be taken as evidence of ineffectiveness of VR more generally.
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