How Disability Benefits in Early Life Affect Long-Term Outcomes

The debate over the Supplemental Security Income program for children reflects a key tradeoff in welfare programs: transfers to disadvantaged households could promote children's human capital development by increasing household resources, but conditioning those transfers on child health and family income could potentially discourage human capital development by creating perverse incentives. In this paper, I use two regression discontinuity designs (RDD) paired with Social Security administrative data to estimate the net effect of receiving SSI in childhood on adult earnings and to separately identify the household resources channel and perverse incentives channels. Using the first RDD, I find that removing children from SSI has a statistically insignificant net effect on child earnings in adulthood. Using the second RDD and a novel data linkage procedure to identify younger siblings in SSA administrative data, I find that removing youth from SSI at the age of 18 reduces the adult earnings of their younger siblings by about $5,000 annually. This finding suggests that SSI's household resources channel has a large positive effect on children's human capital development. I develop a decomposition procedure to determine the relative contributions of the income transfer and the perverse incentives channels to the net effect of SSI.