The rate of application for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits, as well as the number of beneficiaries has been increasing for the past several decades, threatening the solvency of the SSDI program. One possible remedy is to promote continued employment amongst those...

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Government policies attempt to mitigate the economic risks to households of major life transitions. This paper focuses on two such transitions that social security systems typically insure against—long term exits from the labor market (retirement, disability, unemployment insurance) and the...

Between the early 1980s and 2002, both the prevalence of obesity and the number of beneficiaries of the Social Security Disability Insurance program doubled. We test whether these trends are related; specifically, we test whether obesity causes disability and movement onto the disability rolls. We...

Using a single period measure to capture the population with disabilities in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics we observe the same dramatic decline in the relative employment rate of working age people with disabilities in the 1990s that is found in the Current Population Survey. We find that...

This paper compares a variety of measures of fatness (e.g. BMI, waist circumference, waist-tohip ratio, percent body fat) in terms of their ability to predict application for Social Security Disability Insurance (DI). This is possible through a recent linkage of the National Health and Nutrition...

In the 1990s, social expectations of single mothers shifted towards the notion that most should, could, and would work, if given the proper incentives. This shift in expectations culminated in the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, commonly...

In the 1990s, the United States reformed welfare programs targeted on single mothers and dramatically reduced their benefit receipt while increasing their employment and economic wellbeing. Despite increasing calls to do the same for working age people with disabilities in the U.S., disability...

Using linked 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS)-Annual Social and Economic Supplement/Social Security Administration records data and a definition of disability based on the six-question disability sequence (6QS) in the CPS-Basic Monthly Survey, we perform a face validity test that shows that...