Mortality Impacts of Disability Insurance Payments: Context and Implications

Previous research has found that Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) income reduces beneficiaries’ mortality (Gelber, Moore, Pei, and Strand 2022). A key contribution in this paper is to provide context for these results by further describing the economic and demographic circumstances of DI recipients relative to non-recipients, using restricted-use “gold standard” Survey of Income and Program Participation data linked to Social Security Administration records as well as data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We find that DI recipients show important signs of economic disadvantage, particularly in the lower-income groups where DI income has the largest mortality effects. In more preliminary work, we suggest that incorporating the mortality benefits to these lower-income groups can have implications for the analysis of optimal DI benefits, though the implications vary significantly across assumptions and no clear takeaway is possible regarding optimal DI payments.