Retirement, Family Insurance, and Social Insurance: Evidence from the Great Depression and the Introduction of Social Security

在评估美国社会保障和相关计划的替代改革提案时，了解这些计划的总体成本和收益的两个关键方面至关重要。 一个是这些计划如何影响有资格获得福利的个人的选择和福祉。另一个问题是这些福利可能对受益人的子女和家庭产生什么影响。本项目将通过关注老年援助（OAA）计划来调查这些问题，该计划是20世纪30年代与社会保障一起推出的国家管理计划，是社会保障补充保障收入的前身。OAA计划提供了一个异常丰富的经验设置，在其中调查社会保险计划的影响，因为它是政府养老支持的最大来源，直到20世纪50年代，因为它展示了广泛的变化，在程序规则和福利水平在各州。本项目从高龄津贴计划对受益人本身的直接影响和对受益人子女和家庭的间接影响两个方面，研究高龄津贴计划的成本和效益。在大多数社会保险计划中检查这些影响所面临的两个关键挑战是难以在社会保障等国家计划中找到准实验性变化，以及难以在大多数数据集中识别家庭联系。 该项目将通过利用不同州和州内不同人群的OAA政策的显着差异来解决这两个挑战-变化比最近一段时间内的类似计划大得多-并利用新提供的人口普查微观数据覆盖到1940年的所有人口普查年份的全部美国人口。 利用准实验研究设计和丰富的数据，研究人员将估计OAA对劳动力供应和家庭转移的影响。本研究将进一步使用结构统计与非结构统计的方法，以确定这些社会保险计划的福利效应的准实验证据的含义。

In evaluating alternative reform proposals for Social Security and related programs in the United States, it is critical to understand two key dimensions of the overall costs and benefits of these programs. One is how these programs affect the choices and well-being of the individuals eligible to receive benefits themselves. The other is what effects those benefits may have on beneficiaries' children and families. This project will investigate these issues by focusing on the Old Age Assistance (OAA) program, a state-administered program introduced alongside Social Security in the 1930s that was a precursor of Social Security's Supplemental Security Income. The OAA program provides an unusually rich empirical setting in which to investigate the effects of social insurance programs both because it was the largest source of government old-age support until the 1950s and because it exhibited wide variation in program rules and benefit levels across states. This project examines the costs and benefits of the OAA program in terms of its direct effects on beneficiaries themselves and the indirect effects on beneficiaries' children and families. Two of the key challenges that arise from examining these effects in most social insurance programs are the difficulty in finding quasi-experimental variation in national programs such as Social Security and the difficulty of identifying family links in most datasets. This project will address both challenges by exploiting the significant variation in OAA policies across different states and across different groups of people within states -- variation much larger than in similar programs in more recent time periods -- and by taking advantage of newly available Census microdata covering the full US population in all Census years through 1940. Using quasi-experimental research designs and rich data, the investigators will estimate the effects of OAA on labor supply and family transfers. This project will further use both structural and sufficient-statistics methods to determine the implications of the quasi-experimental evidence for the welfare effects of these social insurance programs.