Summary
This paper reexamines impacts from the Profit Offset Nationwide Demonstration (BOND) to discover beforehand unexamined racial variations in participant outcomes. It examines whether or not the impacts of BOND differed by members’ race/ethnicity and the extent to which community-level racial inequities in financial circumstances are correlated with participant outcomes that have been central to BOND’s objectives. It pairs Social Safety Administration (SSA) information from the BOND analysis on a pattern of practically 1 million Social Safety Incapacity Insurance coverage (SSDI) beneficiaries with a number of measures of racial inequalities in employment and financial circumstances for beneficiaries’ county of residence. Exploration of race variations utilizing SSA information has been restricted as a consequence of inconsistent assortment of race/ethnic information. We overcome this subject by combining historic and modern sources of information to assign race/ethnicity to 99 p.c of our pattern.
The paper discovered that:
- Within the absence of the BOND intervention, the best ranges of earnings and employment are noticed amongst beneficiaries within the management group who’re Black or non-Hispanic Asian. Beneficiaries who’re White have the best quantity and months of advantages.
- BOND elevated employment and the proportion with earnings above a programmatic threshold known as the BOND Yearly Quantity (BYA), SSDI funds, and SSDI months for beneficiaries of colour. Will increase in employment and incomes above BYA have been bigger each for Black beneficiaries and all beneficiaries of colour relative to White beneficiaries. Whereas absolute values of impacts have been small, impacts characterize a couple of 5 p.c enhance in employment and a 12 to 14 p.c enhance within the proportion incomes above BYA relative to the management group imply.
- Our outcomes reveal blended associations between area-level inequities and beneficiary outcomes. Racial parity in earnings and unemployment charges are related to declines in employment-related outcomes for White beneficiaries and beneficiaries of colour, whereas intergenerational mobility is uniformly related to will increase in employment-related outcomes for all beneficiaries.
- Combining a number of sources of SSA administrative information allowed us to establish or refine info on beneficiaries’ race/ethnicity for 99 p.c of the BOND pattern.
The coverage implications of the findings are:
- The impacts and advantages of SSA applications might differ relying on a beneficiary’s racial or ethnic id. Furthermore, analyses of beneficiary experiences by race and ethnicity seize experiences solely after acceptance to SSDI and will not account for differential software experiences or award charges by race.
- Inequalities in native financial and social circumstances are sometimes correlated with employment and profit outcomes which are of curiosity to policymakers, although not all the time in a uniform approach. Understanding native circumstances might assist inform efforts to tailor program implementation in consideration of the context wherein they happen.
- Higher assortment and evaluation of data on the race and ethnicity of beneficiaries would develop understanding of differential program experiences.