Essays on the Effects of Social Insurance for Disability

This dissertation examines how social insurance, family support and work capacity enhance individuals' economic well-being following significant health and income shocks. I first examine the extent to which the liquidity-enhancing effects of Worker's Compensation (WC) benefits outweigh the moral hazard costs. Analyzing administrative data from Oregon, I estimate a hazard model exploiting variation in the timing and size of a retroactive lump-sum WC payment to decompose the elasticity of claim duration with respect to benefits into the elasticity with respect to an increase in cash on hand, and a decrease in the opportunity cost of missing work. I find that the liquidity effect accounts for 60 to 65 percent of the increase in claim duration among lower-wage workers, but less than half of the increase for higher earners. Using the framework from Chetty (2008), I conclude that the insurance value of WC exceeds the distortionary cost, and increasing the benefit level could increase social welfare. Next, I investigate how government-provided disability insurance (DI) interacts with private transfers to disabled individuals from their grown children. Using the Health and Retirement Study, I estimate a fixed effects, difference in differences regression to compare transfers between DI recipients and two control groups: rejected applicants and a reweighted sample of disabled non-applicants. I find that DI reduces the probability of receiving a transfer by no more than 3 percentage points, or 10 percent. Additional analysis reveals that DI could increase the probability of receiving a transfer in cases where children had limited prior information about the disability, suggesting that DI could send a welfare-improving information signal. Finally, Zachary Morris and I examine how a functional assessment could complement medical evaluations in determining eligibility for disability benefits and in targeting return to work interventions. We analyze claimants' self-reported functional capacity in a survey of current DI beneficiaries to estimate the share of disability claimants able to do work-related activity. We estimate that 13 percent of current DI beneficiaries are capable of work-related activity. Furthermore, other characteristics of these higher-functioning beneficiaries are positively correlated with employment, making them an appropriate target for return to work interventions.

Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975

A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.