The US Social Security Administration administers retirement, disability, and low-income safety net programs supported by their network of field offices providing in-person customer service. I use employee microdata and a long-differences approach to analyze how staffing decreases during the Reagan era affected program enrollment. I find that a 10% decrease in field office employees in a county led to decreases in enrollment for Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) benefits of 0.06%, driven primarily by disability insurance, and 0.32% for Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) benefits. These reductions imply 79,027 fewer enrollments nationwide than would have occurred absent the staffing cuts.

Paper: PDF Press: UCI , The American Prospect, Chicago Sun Times

As part of major pension reform, the U.S. government switched from a classic defined benefit plan (Civil Service Retirement System) to a new, at-the-time undefined replacement pension scheme. Eligibility for the plans was based on a hiring date before or after January 1, 1984, announced several months beforehand. Using federal employee microdata, I find that compared to other years that see decreased hiring in December followed by a spike in hiring in January, the hiring of civil servants was more uniform between December and January around the cutoff. This points to manipulation of hiring dates for some new employees in response to the change, through agreement between the employee and the hiring agency in a two-party collusion. Because the replacement system was unknown, manipulation was driven by beliefs about the generosity of the new system or avoidance of uncertainty, rather than reflecting the relative value of the plans.