I measure the impact on public benefits enrollment of a period of drastic employment downsizing in field offices of the Social Security Administration. Downsizing occurred only through employee attrition, providing an exogenous source of variation to exploit the differential staffing changes. After controlling for demographic factors and local economic conditions I find that a 10% decrease in field office employees in a county led to a 0.06% decrease in benefits enrollment across OASDI, ranging from 0.04% for Old Age benefits to 0.15% Disability benefits, and 0.32% decrease for overall supplemental security insurance (SSI) enrollment driven primarily by disability beneficiaries. I then do back-of-the-envelope calculations to translate this effect in the mean office into a total effect size and find that the downsizing approximately 84 fewer beneficiaries per county (50 OASDI, 34 SSI), or 79,027 people nationally (47,285 OASDI, 31,742 SSI) who counterfactually would have enrolled by the end of this downsizing period.

Draft: PDF Press: UCI , The American Prospect

As part of major pension reform, the U.S. government switched from a classic defined benefit plan (Civil Service Retirement System) to a new, at-the-time undefined replacement pension scheme. Eligibility for the plans was based on a hiring date before or after January 1, 1984, announced several months beforehand. Using federal employee microdata, I find that compared to other years that see decreased hiring in December followed by a spike in hiring in January, the hiring of civil servants was more uniform between December and January around the cutoff. This points to manipulation of hiring dates for some new employees in response to the change, through agreement between the employee and the hiring agency in a two-party collusion. Because the replacement system was unknown, manipulation was driven by beliefs about the generosity of the new system or avoidance of uncertainty, rather than reflecting the relative value of the plans.