How common is "parking" among Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries? Evidence from the 1999 change in the earnings level of substantial gainful activity

Fewer Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries have their earnings suspended or terminated because of work than those who are actually working, partly because beneficiaries "park" earnings at a level below substantial gainful activity (SGA) to retain benefits. We assess the extent of parking by exploiting the 1999 change in the SGA earnings level from $500 to $700 monthly for nonblind beneficiaries using a difference-indifference analysis that compares two annual cohorts of beneficiaries who completed their trial work period, one that was affected by the SGA change and one that was not. Our impact estimates, along with results from other sources, suggest that from 0.2 to 0.4 percent of all DI beneficiaries were parked below the SGA level in the typical month from 2002 through 2006. The SGA change did not yield any difference in mean earnings, although it did result in a small reduction in months spent off of the rolls because of work.     

Employment among Social Security disability program beneficiaries, 1996-2007

We use linked administrative data from program and earnings records to summarize the 2007 employment rates of Social Security disability program beneficiaries at the national and state levels, as well as changes in employment since 1996. The findings provide new information on the employment activities of beneficiaries that should be useful in assessing current agency policies and providing benchmarks for ongoing demonstration projects and future return-to-work initiatives. The overall employment rate--which we define as annual earnings over $1,000--was 12 percent in 2007. Substantial variation exists within the population. Disability Insurance beneficiaries and those younger than age 40 were much more likely to work relative to other Social Security beneficiaries. Additionally, substantial regional variation exists across states; employment rates ranged from 7 percent (West Virginia) to 23 percent (North Dakota). Moreover, we find that the employment rates among beneficiaries were sensitive to the business cycle and persistent over time.     

Employment of individuals in the Social Security disability programs

The articles in this special issue present findings from research on the employment and work-related activities of individuals receiving benefits through the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs, and on the factors that hinder their efforts to work at levels that lead to exiting the disability rolls. This article introduces the other articles, highlights their important findings, and discusses the implications for ongoing efforts to increase the earnings and self-sufficiency of these beneficiaries, such as the Ticket to Work program and the Benefit Offset National Demonstration.     

Implications of Occupational Locus and Focus for Public Service Motivation: Attitudes Toward Work Motives across Nations

Is occupational locus or focus important for public service motivation? Does national context influence public service motivation? To answer both questions, the author examines attitudes toward work motives from national samples in 11 North American and Western European nations using multilevel binary logistic regression analysis. The findings demonstrate that the locus of an occupation in government and its focus on a public service activity both are important in shaping preferences for work motives related to public service motivation. Also, the preference for work motives held by citizens is correlated with the type of welfare regime in a nation. Although it is less pronounced, some evidence suggests that the type of welfare regime influences preferences toward work motives among government employees.     

The Party Faithful: Partisan Images,Candidate Religion,and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification

We argue that the factors shaping the impact of partisanship on vote choice—“partisan voting”—depend on the nature of party identification. Because party identification is partly based on images of the social group characteristics of the parties, the social profiles of political candidates should affect levels of partisan voting. A candidate's religious affiliation enables a test of this hypothesis. Using survey experiments which vary a hypothetical candidate's religious affiliation, we find strong evidence that candidates’ religions can affect partisan voting. Identifying a candidate as an evangelical (a group viewed as Republican) increases Republican support for, and Democratic opposition to, the candidate, while identifying the candidate as a Catholic (a group lacking a clear partisan profile) has no bearing on partisan voting. Importantly, the conditional effect of candidate religion on partisan voting requires the group to have a salient partisan image and holds with controls for respondents’ own religious affiliations and ideologies.     

Aggregate level forecasting of the 2010 general election in Britain: The Seats-Votes model

The Seats-Votes model forecasts party seat shares in the House of Commons using data from general elections and opinion polls between 1945 and 2009. The model is built on a generalisation of the cube rule which provided a fairly accurate method of translating votes into seats when Britain was effectively a two party system prior to the 1970s. It combines past information on seat shares in the current Parliament with voting intention data six months prior to the general election to forecast seat shares. Applied to the task of forecasting the outcome of a general election in early May of 2010, it predicts a hung Parliament, with the Conservatives as the largest party. The relatively small sample used to estimate the model means that predictions about the size of the parties in Parliament are quite tentative, though predictions about the likelihood of a hung Parliament are more certain.     

Rib fractures in infants due to cardiopulmonary resuscitation efforts

Although it is widely known that adults may sustain fractures of the anterior and/or lateral aspects of the ribs due to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) efforts, relatively little is written about the generation of CPR-related rib fractures in the infant age range. In a series of 70 consecutive autopsies in infants ranging in age from 2 weeks to 8 months, with no history or indications of injury, the parietal pleura of the thoracic cage was stripped and the ribs carefully examined for fracture. Subtle fractures of the anterolateral aspects of the ribs were discovered in 8 (11%) of the 70 cases. In 7 of the 8 cases, multiple ribs were fractured (ranging up to 10 rib fractures), and in 5 of these cases, the rib fractures were bilateral. All of the rib fractures were subtle, had little if any associated blood extravasation, and would have been easily missed had the parietal pleura not been stripped. These anterolateral rib fractures in infants are the likely correlate of anterolateral rib fractures that are not uncommonly seen in the adult population, resulting from resuscitation efforts. The rib fractures are subtle and may not be identified unless the parietal pleura is stripped.     

Regulating Supply Chains to Improve Health and Safety

The fragmentation of previously integrated systems of productionand service delivery has been an important feature of organisationalrestructuring over the last three decades. This article highlightsthe adverse implications of this development for the healthand safety of workers, examines the extent to which currentBritish health and safety law provides an adequate frameworkfor addressing these outcomes and explores whether its capacityto do so could be enhanced through the introduction of new statutoryprovisions on the regulation of supply chains. It concludesthat, in terms of both structure and operation, the presentframework of law is problematic. It further argues that recentinternational initiatives show that it is feasible to developsuch statutory provisions and that existing evidence suggeststhat provisions of this type could usefully be introduced inrespect of a number of areas of activity where the implicationsof the externalisation of production and service delivery seemparticularly problematic.