UM12-11: Personality Traits and Economic Preparation for Retirement
This paper assesses the effects of personality traits on economic preparation for retirement, wealth accumulation, and consumption, among persons 66 to 69 years of age. Among the five chief personality traits of neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, we focus…
UM12-12: The Costs and Benefits of Medicaid in Old Age
Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor. However, the poor tend to live much shorter lifespans and thus incur much lower medical expenses before death. In this paper, we assess the insurance and redistributive properties of Medicaid,…
UM12-13: Investment Decisions in Retirement: the role of expectations, health risk and pension benefits
The rapid transition from defined benefit (DB) pension plans to defined contribution (DC) plans has a potential benefit of offering pension holders greater control over how their pension accumulations are invested. If pension holders are willing to take some risk,…
UM12-14: Using the 2008 CPS-ASEC-SSA Matched Data Set to Show Who Is and Is Not Captured in the Official BLS Six-Question Sequence on Disability
With 2008 CPS-ASEC-SSA administrative records data, we will measure the degree that work-limitation-based and six-question disability sequence-based samples of the working-age population with disabilities capture the SSDI/SSI-disabled adult population. Using other variables on the SSA files (medical listing, stage at…
UM12-15: Estimates of the Potential Insurance Value of Disability Insurance for Individuals with Mental Health Impairments
Since the mid-1980s there has been dramatic growth in the number and fraction of DI and SSI beneficiaries with mental illness. With longer life expectancies and younger ages of disability onset than beneficiaries with physical impairments, their growth exerts added…
UM12-16: The Economic Well-Being of Rejected Disability Applicants
The aim of this research is to improve our understanding of the economic well-being of rejected disability applicants. Previous studies on rejected applicants have tracked them over short time horizons but not had the sample size necessary to decompose rejected…
UM12-17: SSDI and Healthcare Reform: Evidence from Massachusetts
As health insurance coverage becomes available outside of the employment relationship as a result of the Affordable Care Act, the 'cost' of applying for SSDI -- potentially having to go without health insurance coverage during the two-year Medicare waiting period…
UM12-18: Does Disability Insurance Save Lives?
Previous research has shown that changes in income and health insurance are associated with changes in health and/or mortality. This study examines whether participation in the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and/or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs causally affects survival…
UM12-19: Trends in Longitudinal Statistics for Young Social Security Disability Awardees
Building on past work, we will use administrative data on annual cohorts of young Social Security Disability (SSD) awardees -- Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) workers and Disabled Adult Children (DAC) -- to produce statistics on their characteristics, employment, time…
UM12-20: Recessionary Impacts on SSI Participation
The Supplemental Security Income Program (SSI) provides federally-funded income support for disabled individuals and has become the most important means-tested transfer program in the United States. Previous studies have examined the effects of economic conditions on growth in disability caseloads,…