Does Welfare Inhibit Success? The Long-Term Effects of Removing Low-Income Youth from the Disability Rolls

Abstract

I estimate the effects of removing low-income youth with disabilities from Supplemental Security Income (SSI) on their earnings and income in adulthood. Using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews, I find that youth who are removed from SSI at age 18 recover one-third of the lost SSI cash income in earnings. SSI youth who are removed and stay off SSI earn on average $4,400 annually, and they lose $76,000 in present discounted observed income over the 16 years following removal relative to those who do not receive a review. (JEL I30, I38, J14)

Fear and the Safety Net: Evidence from Secure Communities

“…These results suggest that our main findings are unlikely due to Hispanic households being less likely to receive information about public programs as their coethnics reduce sign up. This finding, combined with qualitative evidence suggesting that Hispanic families are not renewing benefits, also lessens the likelihood that an explanation like stigma is 42 A related explanation is the role of legitimacy, or the theory that individuals cooperate or engage with legal authorities based on their perception of how fairly these authorities deal with members of the public (Tyler 2006). Under this theory, SC may have reduced program participation because it corroded the perceived legitimacy of the federal government in the eyes of Hispanic citizens.…”

Long-Term Impacts of Childhood Medicaid Expansions on Outcomes in Adulthood

“…Boudreaux et al (2016) find impacts of the initial adoption of Medicaid on an index of health outcomes, but they do not have enough power to detect meaningful impacts on economic outcomes. A growing literature finds impacts on the long-term economic outcomes of children exposed to other elements of the U.S. social safety net, including disability insurance (Deshpande, 2016), the Food Stamp program (Hoynes et al, 2016), and housing policy (Chetty et al, 2016). A related growing literature finds long-term impacts of childhood interventions outside of the United States, including child care in Norway (Havnes and Mogstad, 2011), well-child visits in Norway (Butikofer et al, forthcoming), medical care at birth for very low birth weight infants in Norway and Chile (Bharadwaj et al, 2013), and a deworming program in Kenya (Baird et al, 2016).…”

Fear and the Safety Net: Evidence from Secure Communities

“…In column 7, we present results from our main specification where for treated counties that activate in a particular year, we define control counties as those that activate more than two years in the future, following Deshpande and Li (forthcoming). 42 Finally, column 8 presents results for a sample of citizen households where the head has some college or more, a sample that has much lower participation in safety net programs and lower connectedness to non-citizens compared to our preferred sample. We find that our estimates are much smaller in magnitude in this alternative sample, suggesting that the effect of SC on program take-up is most concentrated among our fragile connected sample.…”