CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Differences in Disability Insurance Allowance Rates

August 2025

Working Paper Number:

CES-25-54

Abstract

Allowance rates for disability insurance applications vary by race and ethnicity, but it is unclear to what extent these differences are artifacts of other differing socio-economic and health characteristics, or selection issues in SSA's race and ethnicity data. This paper uses the 2015 American Community Survey linked to 2015-2019 SSA administrative data to investigate DI application allowance rates among non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic Asian, non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic applicants aged 25-65. The analysis uses regression, propensity score matching, and inverse probability weighting to estimate differences in allowance rates among applicants who are similar on observable characteristics. Relative to raw comparisons, differences by race and ethnicity in multivariate analyses are substantially smaller in magnitude and are generally not statistically significant.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
respondent, ethnicity, ethnic, hispanic, asian, insurance, latino, racial, race, indian, ssa, benefit, eligibility, disability, propensity

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Social Security Administration, Service Annual Survey, Office of Management and Budget, Current Population Survey, Survey of Income and Program Participation, General Accounting Office, Social Security, American Community Survey, Social Security Number, Health and Retirement Study, Detailed Earnings Records, Protected Identification Key, Social Security Disability Insurance, Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board, ASEC, CPS ASEC

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