Examining Racial Inequities in BOND Impacts

In this paper, we re-examine impacts from the Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND) to explore previously unexamined racial differences in participant outcomes. Specifically, we examine whether the impacts of BOND differed by participants’ race/ethnicity and the extent to which community-level racial inequities in economic conditions are correlated with participant outcomes that were central to BOND’s goals. To do so, we pair Social Security Administration (SSA) data from the BOND evaluation on a sample of nearly 1 million Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries with multiple well-validated measures of racial inequalities in employment and economic conditions for beneficiaries’ county of residence. Exploration of race differences using SSA data has been limited due to inconsistent collection of race/ethnic data. We overcome this issue by combining historical and contemporary sources of data to assign race/ethnicity to 99 percent of our sample.

We find statistically significant differences between race/ethnic groups in employment rates, the proportion with earnings above an annual programmatic threshold called the BOND Yearly Amount, and number of months with SSDI benefit receipt in 2014, the third full year of the demonstration. Our results reveal mixed associations between area-level inequities and beneficiary outcomes, wherein greater inequities were sometimes, but not always, associated with worse employment and earnings outcomes for beneficiaries of all race/ethnic identities. This research highlights structural forces that contribute to racial disparities in return to work and can inform SSA efforts to tailor program implementation in consideration of the context in which they occur.