The importance of prejudice against persons with disabilities

Based on the Canadian 2006 Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS), we estimate the effect of prejudice on the earnings of persons with a disability. We extract external information from medical and psychology studies that record the degree of prejudice against specific disabilities and link those prejudice indices to our disability categories. We find that the earnings of persons with a disability are strongly affected by the degree of prejudice associated with their disability, after controlling for the wide range of other factors that can affect earnings.