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建议时，关键是要了解这些计划的总体成本和收益的两个关键维度。一个是这些计划如何影响有资格自己领取福利的个人的选择和福祉。另一个问题是，这些福利可能会对受益人的子女和家庭产生什么影响。这个项目将通过关注老年援助(OAA)计划来调查这些问题，OAA计划是20世纪30年代与社会保障一起引入的国家管理计划，是社会保障补充保障收入的前身。高龄津贴计划提供了一个异常丰富的经验背景，可以用来调查社会保险计划的影响，这既是因为它在20世纪50年代之前一直是政府养老支持的最大来源，也是因为它在计划规则和福利水平方面在各州表现出很大的差异。该项目从其对受益人本身的直接影响以及对受益人子女和家庭的间接影响的角度，审查了高龄津贴方案的成本和收益。在大多数社会保险项目中考察这些影响时产生的两个关键挑战是，很难在社会保障等国家项目中找到准试验性变量，以及很难在大多数数据集中确定家庭联系。该项目将通过利用不同州和州内不同人群之间高龄津贴政策的显著差异--差异比最近时期类似计划中的差异大得多--来应对这两个挑战，并利用最新可用的涵盖1940年前所有人口普查年的人口普查微观数据。利用准实验研究设计和丰富的数据，研究人员将估计高龄津贴对劳动力供应和家庭转移的影响。这个项目将进一步使用结构和充分统计方法来确定准实验证据对这些社会保险计划的福利效应的影响。

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.