Susan Chen

Overview

Susan E. Chen is an economist whose research focuses on the labor supply effects of disability insurance programs. She is co-author, with Wilbert van der Klaauw, of the 2008 Journal of Econometrics paper (Purdue affiliation) that updated Bound's (1989) comparison-group upper bound on DI work disincentives and introduced a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design using the SSA vocational grid's age cutoffs. A 2012 working paper (University of Alabama affiliation) extends her work to the household level, estimating the crowd-out of wife's labor supply by husband's DI receipt. Internal evidence — the 2012 paper's reference to "Chen et al. (2008)" — suggests the same researcher across both affiliations.

Key Contributions

• Co-developed the first RD application to the vocational grid age cutoffs (45, 50, 55) as a source of quasi-random variation in DI award probability for Stage 5 (vocational) applicants — a precursor to the examiner/judge IV designs of Maestas, Mullen, and Strand (2013) and French and Song (2014)
• Updated Bound's 30 pp comparison-group upper bound to ~20 pp using 1990s SIPP-SSA linked data
• Extended the DI work-disincentive literature to women and SSI applicants
• Estimated the crowd-out of the Added Worker Effect by DI: −6% wife LFP at year 1, growing to −8.4% by year 5, using a fixed-effects event study comparing wives of accepted vs. rejected DI applicants (SIPP-SSA linked data, N = 39,519, 1980–2008)
• Documented the earnings/participation paradox: wives of DI beneficiaries earn more despite participating less — explained compositionally by lower-earning wives being the margin of exit
• Documented long-run welfare-shifting for rejected DI applicants (2014 MRRC working paper): using SIPP 1990–2008 linked to SSA admin records, found that rejection does not restore labor supply (−23 pp at t+10) and that rejected applicants' dependency on social support programs (TANF, food stamps, UI, general assistance) converges to that of approved beneficiaries by t+7 to t+10 — a difference of at most 7 pp that is statistically indistinguishable from zero in the long run

Related

• Causal Effects of DI Receipt
• Added Worker Effect
• Vocational Grid
• Wilbert van der Klaauw
• Disability Insurance Program
• SSA Sequential Determination Process
• DI Denied Population
• Program Spillovers

Sources

• Chen and van der Klaauw 2008 — The Work Disincentive Effects of the Disability Insurance Program in the 1990s
• Chen 2012 — Spousal Labor Supply Responses to Government Programs Evidence from the Disability Insurance Program
• Chen 2014 — Rejection from the Disability Insurance Program and Dependency on Social Support
• Strand and Messel 2019 — The Ability of Older Workers with Impairments to Adapt to New Jobs