April Yanyuan Wu’s primary research interest is in policies focusing on employment of older workers, individuals with disabilities, and other vulnerable groups. Her work covers a broad area of topics in public finance and labor economics, with emphasis on the economics of aging, employment and retirement, disability and unemployment insurance, the safety net for and well-being of older people and individuals with disabilities, and poverty and inequality.
Since joining Mathematica in 2014, Wu has worked on a range of projects in the areas of disability, labor, nutrition, and family support. She has extensive experience in conducting quantitative analyses based on administrative data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as linking administrative data to survey data such as data from the Health and Retirement Study. She is the principal investigator for multiple research studies through SSA's Disability Research Consortium, including an analysis of the occupational skill and ability requirements of applicants to federal disability insurance benefits, the well-being and employment of older workers with disabling conditions, and the employment and occupational trajectories of older workers who experience disability onset. In addition, she leads the literature review on the topic of older workers for the Clearinghouse for Labor Evaluation and Research. Past projects include constructing the Disability Analysis File, conducting impact evaluations for the Parents and Children Together evaluation and the Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration, and work on the Army Unemployment Compensation for Ex-Servicemembers Claimants Evaluation.
Wu has published in the journals Research in Labor Economics, Social Security Bulletin, Risk Management and Insurance Review, and the IZA Journal of Labor Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago and came to Mathematica from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, where she was a research economist.
On this episode of On the Evidence, April Yanyuan Wu, a researcher at Mathematica, discusses a project that used supervised machine learning to estimate prescription opioid use among applicants for Social Security Disability Insurance.
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