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 translates to approximately 24 fewer beneficiaries per county (16 OASDI, 7 SSI), or 21,692 people nationally (15,056 OASDI, 6,636 SSI), who counterfactually would have enrolled by the end of this downsizing period.

Press: UCI