Overview
Austin Nichols is a labor economist and senior research associate at the Urban Institute, where his research focuses on poverty, social insurance programs, and disability policy. He has worked on the interaction between temporary assistance programs (UI, SNAP, TANF, TDI) and disability insurance applications, as well as household income dynamics of disability insurance applicants.
Key Contributions
- Cross-program social insurance interactions (Lindner and Nichols 2012): Co-authored study using SIPP 1996–2010 and state-policy instruments to identify causal effects of four temporary assistance programs on DI/SSI applications and re-employment. Found UI deters DI applications while SNAP may facilitate SSI applications; introduced the target-population-overlap principle for predicting the direction of cross-program effects. See Lindner and Nichols 2012 — The Impact of Temporary Assistance Programs on Disability Rolls and Re-Employment.
- Tracking household income of disability applicants (Bound, Burkhauser, and Nichols 2003): Co-authored chapter documenting household income trajectories of SSDI and SSI applicants using SSA administrative data.
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