Now do the people who get sick

It is essential to know that the $1 BILLION of savings noted here is less than 0.1% of the total amount spent on annually Social Security -- why is the benchmark the operating budget? Can't help but think of Dr. Evil here...

First big sabbatical project achieved!

The size of the incentive and general employment barriers also mattered. For those with the most prior work activity, the offset theoretically REDUCES incentive to work (but for this small group, employment did not change). 90% noted difficulty working, and 55% had zero earnings.

3/5

One big factor was administrative burden. Beneficiaries REALLY struggled with understanding rules (both for the new rules and the current rules). Frequent overpayments for those who worked made it that much harder to connect work activity to benefit amounts. Learning costs make a difference!

2/5

New paper in @jpube.bsky.social: Changing SSDI work incentives by replacing a cash cliff—where people lose their benefits by earning even $1 above a threshold—with a benefit offset does not affect work activity (using an RCT with 10,000 SSDI beneficiaries). The key question then is why!

1/5

I'm getting ready to talk about data on government fraud in my public econ class later this week -- is this $140B number because they simply summed every number with a B in the list at the last link, ignoring that the last point of $55B refers to proper payments?

Seems worth repeating

We all have an emotional support dead famous guy and who is he says a lot about you.

How is it reasonable to call it a “plan” to achieve 3% growth, 3% deficit, and 300 million barrels of oil? Isn’t that a lofty goal that has no actual way of being met in reality? A plan would involve actual policy actions that move the needle, which this article discussed zero of.

I would like to meet the person who listened to follow the yellow brick road more than me this year and shake their hand and/or give them a hug

The perfect lunch break- fresh tracks with a view @colgateuniversity.bsky.social

Another recent pub: we explore how continuing disability reviews have affected recent trends in child SSI caseloads. Short answer -- they mattered a lot! Patterns in CDRs can explain ~65% of the variation -- CDRs were rare as caseloads grew and common as they fell. www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/...

Declines stem from disruptions to referrals from key staff like school psychologists and special education teachers. We saw larger declines in applications in counties that had more school psychologists, where the change in services with the closures was largest.

First recent pub in @jpube.bsky.social: we use variation in school closures during COVID to show that schools are an important channel through which families learn about and apply for SSI: applications were ~20 percent lower in counties with virtual learning www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How do you think about this in the context of the Case and Deaton work showing even the US is basically bifurcated by with BA/no BA? There's obvious issues with selection in terms of who continues to not have a BA, but I find this chart equally stunning. www.brookings.edu/wp-content/u...

At #2024APPAM today? Come by Chesapeake 2 at 10:15 for our panel on caseload dynamics of SSI recipients. I'll present on using Medicaid claims to identify kids likely eligible for SSI, my co-author is presenting our paper on how continuing disability reviews affect caseloads. Hope to see you!

In the unfortunately prescient words of Trey Anastasio, "This time will be different... until I do it again"