Examining racial inequities in BOND impacts

Abstract

This paper reexamines impacts from the Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND) to explore previously unexamined racial differences in participant outcomes. It examines 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. It pairs Social Security Administration (SSA) data from the BOND evaluation on a sample of nearly 1 million Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries with multiple 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.