Disability employment and working from home in Australia

Australia experienced a sharp increase in disability employment in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A similar rise in the United States has been attributed to improved access to work from home (WFH) arrangements, which can greatly reduce employment barriers for people with disability. Using an occupation-level instrumental variable approach that includes controls for macroeconomic effects, observable compositional changes and the NDIS rollout, this study finds that the post-pandemic rise in disability employment in Australia is primarily due to a tight labour market, not increased WFH uptake. Extending the analysis through a triple-difference design that controls for unobservable compositional changes finds no post-pandemic employment increase for people with disability in high WFH-capability occupations. Instead, the triple-difference results indicate a counterintuitive decrease in part-time employment, which had fallen by 11.3ppts by 2023.