Patrick Button will present, "Do Stronger Employment Discrimination Protections Decrease Reliance on Social Security Disability Insurance? Evidence from the Social Security Reforms." 

This is joint work with Mashfiqur R. Kahn, who earned his Ph.D. from Boston College in 2017.

Patrick Button is an assistant professor in the economics department at Tulane University and an NIH/NIH Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for the Study of Aging at the RAND Corporation,

Abstract for the presentation:

The Social Security Amendments of 1983 (SSA1983) increased the full retirement age (FRA) and increased penalties for retiring before the FRA. This cut to retirement benefits caused spillover effects on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications and receipt by making SSDI relatively more generous. We explore if stronger disability and age discrimination laws moderated these spillovers, using variation whereby many state laws are broader or stronger than federal law. We estimate the effects of these laws on SSDI applications and receipt using a difference-in-differences approach, comparing cohorts affected by SSA1983 to similarly-aged unaffected cohorts, across states. We find that a broader definition of disability, where only a medically-diagnosed condition is required to be covered under state law, significantly reduces SSDI applications induced by SSA1983. We find weaker evidence that other broader or stronger features of state disability discrimination laws also reduce SSDI applications. These results are larger and more statistically significant for women. We do not find much evidence that age discrimination laws reduce spillovers, and we find few effects on SSDI receipt for any laws. These results suggest that broader and stronger disability discrimination laws reduce employment barriers, allowing older individuals to work longer, possibly reducing reliance on SSDI and costly applications to SSDI.