We examine the impact of the coal boom of the 1970's and the coal bust of the 1980's on disability program participation. These shocks provide clear evidence that as the value of labor-market participation increases, disability program participation falls. For the Disability Insurance program, the elasticity of payments with respect to local earnings is between -0.3 and -0.4 and for Supplemental Security Income the elasticity is between -0.4 and -0.7. Consistent with a model where qualifying for disability programs is costly, the relationship between economic conditions and program participation is much stronger for permanent than for transitory economic shocks.

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are “rational cheaters,” who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate the “rational cheater model” by observing how experimentally induced variation in monitoring of telephone call center employees influences opportunism. A significant fraction of employees behave as the “rational cheater model” predicts. A substantial proportion of employees, however, do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to variation in employee assessments of their general treatment by the employer.