We’re excited to continue the Stone Inequality seminar series with our speaker, Hilary Hoynes, Chancellor’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Hoynes will present her research on “Social Security Disability Reform and Implications for Targeting and Employment.” This paper explores the effects of data-driven policy reforms within the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and examines how these changes influenced the employment outcomes of applicants, shedding light on how targeting in the SSDI program has evolved.
Abstract
Beginning in 2010, the Social Security Administration began implementing a series of data driven policy initiatives to improve the quality and consistency of disability case reviews performed by Administrative Law Judges (ALJs). The policy initiatives included revised training curricula for ALJs, new decision-support tools, and direct feedback about common decision errors. Around this time, the hearing-level allowance rate dropped by 22 percentage points and employment among people with disabilities rose for the first time in decades. However, it is not known what, if any, role the policy initiatives played in these changes. This paper investigates the impacts of the SSDI policy initiatives on the hearing-level allowance rate and the effects of these changes in allowance rates on the employment and earnings of applicants. We find that the policy initiatives account for 28-36% of the decline in the hearing-level allowance rate. We use the reforms as instruments and random assignment of judges to cases and find that 30% of applicants had their decision affected by the reforms (reform compliers) and, as the margin of allowance tightened, led to increased work activity among denied applicants. With this unique policy setting, we study how the targeting of the SSDI program changed with reform. We use judge propensity IV to examine how the labor supply effects of SSDI receipt change over time, examine which applicants are rejected as the program becomes more stringent, and reflect on the targeting of the program.
Event Details
Date: October 25, 2024
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 PM
Location: Iona 533, 6000 Iona Dr, Vancouver, BC
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Hilary Hoynes is the Chancellor’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley where she directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab and co-directs the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. She is an economist who works on poverty, inequality, and the social safety net. Her current research examines how access to the social safety net in early life affects children’s later life health and human capital outcomes.
Hoynes is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Art and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. She has served as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. She is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on National Statistics and serves on the board of MDRC and the California Budget and Policy Center.
Previously, she served as a Vice President of the American Economic Association and was a member of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Council of Economic Advisors. She also served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years, the State of California Task Force on Lifting Children and Families out of Poverty, and the Federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making.
In 2014, she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association. Dr. Hoynes received her PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1992 and her undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from Colby College in 1983.