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     From a contracting notice posted by the Social Security Administration: ... Disability claimants who have an Appointed Representative (AR) have an increased likelihood of award at the hearings level, but not earlier in the disability adjudication process.   Experts have suggested that the current attorney fee structure, under which representatives receive 25 percent of claimants� back benefits up to $6,000, encourages representatives to work with claimants later in the disability adjudication process.   In April of 2019, SSA convened a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) to discuss a potential demonstration that would alter the incentives for representatives to work with applicants at the reconsideration level of adjudication.   The TEP discussed alternatives to the current attorney fee structure as well as opportunities to improve representatives� access to case information and documentation.   The TEP provided SSA with recommendations to test as par...

      From Alicia Munnell, published in Market Watch : A forthcoming study by two of my colleagues, Wenliang Hou and Geoff Sanzenbacher , looks at retirement wealth by race. ... The results are shown in the table below. Without Social Security, the wealth of white households was seven times that of black households and five times that of Hispanic households. Add in Social Security and the disparity for both black and Hispanic households is reduced to 2 to 1.    The reason that Social Security has such a powerful effect is that the program is universal and its benefit formula is progressive. A universal program allows minority workers to build up credits as they move from job to job. This constancy differs from employer-sponsored retirement plans, where minorities often work for employers that do not provide coverage. A progressive benefit formula provides much higher benefits relative to earnings for low-wage workers than for their high-wag...

     From The Role of Information in Disability Insurance Application: An Analysis of the Social Security Statement Phase-In by Philip Armour published in the American Economic Journal in August 2018: This paper exploits a natural experiment in information provision on US Disability Insurance ( DI ) applications: the Social Security state ment. Although the effect of the statement on DI application was neg ligible in the general health and retirement study population , among those previously reporting a work limitation , biennial DI application rates approximately doubled. This effect was driven by previously uninformed individuals. Additional analyses show these were new applicants and were no less likely to be accepted onto DI , accounting for a substantial fraction of the rise in DI rolls from 1994 to 2004 and indicating the importance of informational frictions in disability policymaking.      I know this study i...