Arif Mamun

Is There a Cohabitation Premium in Men's Earnings?

This paper provides new evidence on wage premiums for men in relation to marriage and cohabitation. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the paper shows that even after accounting for selection there is a cohabitation wage premium, albeit smaller than the marriage premium, for White and Black men but not for Hispanic men. The wage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the wage profile over the length of the relationship. We put forward a joint human capital hypothesis where intra-household spillover effects of partner’s education can explain the existence of the wage premiums. Our findings provide some empirical support for the joint human capital hypothesis.

Return-to-Work Outcomes Among Social Security Disability Insurance Program Beneficiaries

We followed a sample of working-age Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program beneficiaries for 5 years after their first benefit award to learn how certain factors are associated with achievement of four return-to-work milestones: enrollment for employment services provided by a state vocational rehabilitation agency or employment network, start of a trial work period (TWP), completion of TWP, and suspension or termination of benefits because of work. We found that younger beneficiaries are more likely than are older beneficiaries to achieve the milestones and that there exists substantial variation across impairment types. In addition, the probability of achieving the milestones is higher for individuals with more years of education, for Blacks, and for individuals residing in states with low unemployment rates at the time of award. It is lower for beneficiaries with a high DI benefit amount at award, an award decision made at a higher adjudicative level, and/or Supplemental Security Income or Medicare benefits at the time of DI award. We also found large variation in the relationships of both state of residence and award month to these return-to-work outcomes. We attribute these variations to unobserved factors at the state-level, policy changes, and trends in unobserved beneficiary characteristics.

Return to Work of Disability Insurance Beneficiaries Who Do and Do Not Access State Vocational Rehabilitation Agency Services

This study examines the relationship between services provided by state vocational rehabilitation agencies (SVRAs) and return-to-work outcomes of Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries. DI beneficiaries who enrolled in SVRA services were compared with matched and unmatched comparison groups of beneficiaries who did not enroll in these services. We examined the progression to substantial employment milestones for DI beneficiaries over a 10-year period beginning with their entry into the DI program. Employment outcomes of the SVRA enrollee group are substantially better than those of their matched and non-matched non-enrollee counterparts, and the timing of their employment outcomes is strongly associated with the timing of vocational rehabilitation (VR) enrollment. These findings indicate that differences in employment outcomes between DI beneficiaries who received VR services and those who did not are not simply due to observable differences.

Initial impacts of the Ticket to Work program: estimates based on exogenous variation in Ticket mail months

This paper presents results from an impact analysis of the Ticket to Work (TTW) program, as implemented by the Social Security Administration (SSA) from 2002 through 2007. For new, young Social Security Disability beneficiaries, we use exogenous variation in the month of Ticket mailing to rigorously estimate impacts of TTW on beneficiary outcomes over a 48-month period following the start of Ticket mailings in the beneficiary’s state. We find substantial impacts on enrollment for employment services with TTW-qualified providers, but no consistent evidence of impacts on the number of months in which beneficiaries did not receive benefits because of work, or on other outcomes.JEL classificationH55; I38

An Analysis of 1-Year Impacts of Youth Transition Demonstration Projects

This article examines the impacts of the Youth Transition Demonstration, an initiative of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to improve employment outcomes for youth with disabilities. Based on a random assignment design, the analysis uses data from a 1-year follow-up survey and SSA administrative records for 5,203 youth in six research sites to estimate demonstration effects. Three of the six demonstration projects had positive impacts on the rate at which youth were employed during the year after they entered the evaluation. Those impacts were concentrated in sites where the projects provided more hours of services, counterfactual services were weak, and the target population of youth had more severe disabilities.

The White Picket Fence Dream: Effects of Assets on the Choice of Family Union

A recent strand of literature in demography argues that young unmarried Americans value marriage so highly that it is perceived as a family status to be chosen after certain economic preconditions are fulfilled – after they have achieved the so-called “white picket fence dream” (a house, surplus income etc.). Motivated by these claims, in this paper we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to examine whether there is any direct relationship between the individual’s housing and financial assets and his/her transition into marriage or cohabitation. For both men and women, analysis using a proportional hazard model indicates a positive association of asset ownership with transition into marriage, but not with transition into cohabitation. Considering the potential endogeneity of asset accumulation with respect to the choice of family status, we implement instrumental variables probit estimation. These estimates either remove the statistical significance of the association between asset ownership and family union transitions, or identify effects that are in the opposite direction to those derived from the time-to-event analysis.

Impact of Early Work Experiences on Subsequent Paid Employment for Young Adults With Disabilities

To better understand how early work experience shapes subsequent employment outcomes for young people (ages 18 to 20) with disabilities, we analyzed longitudinal data from the Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) evaluation to test whether the employment experiences of 1,053 youth during the initial year after entry affected their employment during the third year after entry. To derive causal estimates, we used a dynamic-panel estimation model to account for time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics that may be correlated with youth’s self-selection into both early and later employment. We also controlled for other socioeconomic and health factors that may affect later employment. We found that early work experience increases the probability of being employed 2 years later by 17 percentage points. This estimate is an important advancement over the correlational approaches that characterize the current literature and provides stronger evidence that early work experience is a key determinant of subsequent labor market success.