Overview
Timothy Waidmann is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute working on disability policy, health economics, and aging. He collaborates extensively with John Bound using HRS linked to SSA administrative records. He co-authored Bound, Caswell, and Waidmann (2013) on DI insurance value for mental health impairments, and Bound, Geronimus, Rodriguez, and Waidmann (2015) on compositional bias in longevity trends.
Key Contributions / Features
- Reconciling DI employment effects (Bound, Lindner, and Waidmann 2014): Co-authored SIPP-SSA decomposition resolving the tension between aggregate time-series attribution and IV causal estimates of DI's work disincentive; during the 1996–2004 period of minimal DI growth, employment among work-limited men continued falling, establishing that factors beyond program expansion explain most of the decline. See Causal Effects of DI Receipt.
- Insurance value of DI for mental health (Bound, Caswell, and Waidmann 2013): Co-authored propensity-score analysis showing approved and rejected DI applicants with mental illness are economically equivalent after reweighting; health insurance is the clearest program benefit. See DI Denied Population and Causal Effects of DI Receipt.
- Compositional bias in LE trends (Bound et al. 2015): Co-authored the correction showing that widely reported declines in low-education white LE are largely artifacts of rising educational attainment; the apparent 3.9-year decline for white women shrinks to 1.2 years under relative educational rank. See Period Mortality.
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