In a Sunday, January 20, 2008, New York Times Magazine article entitled "Unintended Consequences," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt wrote:

"...the economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist once asked.... How did the A.D.A. affect employment among the disabled? Their conclusion was rather startling.... [They] found that when the A.D.A. was enacted in 1992 [sic], it led to a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers."

The gist of the "Unintended Consequences" article is that well-meaning laws sometimes backfire. In 2004 two researchers, Andrew J. Houtenville and Richard V. Burkhauser, concluded in a study entitled "Did the Employment of People with Disabilities Decline in the 1990s, and was the ADA Responsible? A Replication and Robustness Check of Acemoglu and Angrist (2001) – Research Brief:"

"The relative employment of working-age people with disabilities declined in the 1990s. Based on our review of the evidence, however, the ADA is not the likely cause of this decline."

Houtenville and Burkhauser are professors in Cornell University’s Employment and Disability Institute. Our (albeit, non-professional researchers status) search of the internet on this topic unearthed no rebuttal to the Cornell piece by Acemoglu and Angrist or any other researchers. Our opinion is that the ADA is so significant that it is now firmly woven into the fabric of American culture and that qualified people with disabilities (and who among us is immune from disability?) will have the same opportunities in the workplace as everyone else. We welcome your comments, and the full articles are available below. They are in a PDF format, so you will need Adobe Reader to view them. Unintended Consequences. Did the Employment of People with Disabilities Decline in the 1990s, and was the ADA Responsible? A Replication and Robustness Check of Acemoglu and Angrist (2001) – Research Brief.