Citation
Liu, Su, & Stapleton, David C. (2011). Longitudinal Statistics on Work Activity and Use of Employment Supports for New Social Security Disability Insurance Beneficiaries. Social Security Bulletin, 71(3).
Highlights
- This study used administrative data files constructed for the Ticket to Work (TTW) evaluation. These files contained extensive information on the more than 20 million Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income recipients who received a benefit in at least one month from January 1996 through December 2007. They included data on benefits, earnings, and enrollment in vocational rehabilitation services for 100 percent of the Disability Insurance population, with a few exceptions, over this time period.
- For the first (1996) cohort, the study documented the different pathways that led recipients to benefit termination. It presented longitudinal statistics on employment, earnings, and use of work incentives, and showed variation in work incentive statistics by state. It then compared selected statistics for more recent cohorts, and considered policy implications of all findings, including implications for TTW and other employment initiatives.
- These longitudinal statistics painted a somewhat more optimistic picture of the efforts of recipients to find work compared with the Social Security Administration’s then-published cross-sectional statistics.
- The authors also concluded that changing the Disability Insurance program to help recipients increase earnings might not produce program savings even if the changes increased exits from Disability Insurance, because the program might have provided additional support to those who would exit anyway.
Reviewed by CLEAR
December 2014