Quantifying the mortality impact of the 1935 old-age assistance

In 1935, the United States introduced the old-age assistance (OAA) program, a means-tested program to help the elderly poor. The OAA improved retirement conditions and aimed to enable older persons to live independently. We use the transition from early elderly plans to OAA and the large differences in payments and eligibility across states to show that OAA reduced mortality by between 30 and 39 percent among those older than 65 years. This finding, based on an event study design, is robust to a range of specifications, a range of fixed effects, placebo tests, and a border-pair policy discontinuity design using county-level data. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases, such as influenza and nephritis, and mostly affected white citizens.

Save Our Senior Noncitizens: Extending Old Age Assistance to Immigrants in the United States, 1935–71

When do states grant social rights to noncitizens? I explore this question by examining the extension of Old Age Assistance (OAA) to noncitizens after the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. While the act contained no alienage-based restrictions, states were permitted to bar noncitizens from means-tested programs. In 1939, 31 states had alienage restrictions for OAA. By 1971, when the Supreme Court declared state-level alienage restrictions unconstitutional, only eight states still did. States with more Mexicans and Asians were slower to repeal restriction, however. Using in-depth case studies of New York, California, and Texas, I demonstrate the importance of federal and state institutional arrangements and immigrant political power for the extension of social rights to noncitizens. I also show that to secure access to OAA, immigrant advocates adapted their strategies to match the institutional and political context.

Government Old-Age Support and Labor Supply: Evidence from the Old Age Assistance Program

Many government programs transfer resources to older people and implicitly or explicitly tax their labor. We shed new light on the labor supply and welfare effects of such programs by investigating the Old Age Assistance Program (OAA). Exploiting the large differences in OAA programs across states and Census data on the entire US population in 1940, we find that OAA reduced the labor force participation rate among men aged 65–74 by 8.5 percentage points, more than one-half of its 1930–1940 decline, but that OAA’s implicit taxation of earnings imposed only small welfare costs on recipients. (JEL H24, H55, H75, J14, J22)

Resisting a Right to Relief: States, Responsible Relative Laws, and Old Age Assistance

Efforts to modernize public assistance via the Social Security Act of 1935 met significant opposition from states. One manifestation of that resistance was state responsible relative laws in the Old Age Assistance program. Responsible relative laws enforced support by adult children as an eligibility requirement; applicants with children deemed able to provide support were either denied aid, or the grant awarded was reduced. These laws are an example of parent dependency policies that sought to enforce or encourage family members, particularly adult children, to support parents in need. States sought to ensure that all financial resources were exhausted before public funds were spent on OAA. Responsible relative laws were an arena of public assistance that remained under state discretion, and many states used them to control costs and contest federal efforts to modernize relief programs and limit state and local authority.