Overview
Kathy A. Ruffing is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), where she specializes in Social Security and disability policy. Her 2014 analysis of DI enrollment growth provided a count-based five-factor accounting and a cross-study reconciliation table that clarified why existing decomposition estimates appeared contradictory. She identified women's catch-up to men's DI receipt rates as an under-studied driver and documented the negligible actuarial impact of DBRA 1984 per SSA's own estimates.
Key Contributions
- Geography of disability (Ruffing 2015): showed that four factors — low educational attainment, older workforce, fewer immigrants, and blue-collar industry mix — explain ~85% of cross-state variation in DI/SSI receipt rates (2013 data). The South/Appalachia pattern (rates nearly double the national average) is a structural consequence of SSA's vocational eligibility framework, not evidence of lax screening. Unemployment rates explain almost none of the geographic variation, because marginal applicants activated by recessions are also more likely to be denied.
- Five-factor accounting (Ruffing 2014): decomposed DI growth into population growth (+1.25M), population aging (+900K), women's LFP (+900K), FRA rise 65→66 (+450K), and women's catch-up (+650K) — explaining 78% of the 2013 beneficiary total.
- Cross-study reconciliation: showed that divergent demographic-attribution estimates (40%–90%) in the literature result from outcome variable choice (number vs. rate), period selection, and women's catch-up inclusion — not underlying disagreement about the data.
- Women's catch-up finding: identified the convergence of female-to-male DI receipt rates (insured women went from ~75% as likely as insured men in 1980 to virtual parity by 2013) as a factor absent from most prior analyses.
- DBRA impact: cited SSA actuarial estimate of 0.01% of taxable payroll long-run cost for DBRA 1984 — effectively negligible.
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