Stone Center Director Janet Gornick, Professor Sarah K. Bruch of the University of Delaware, and Graduate Center Sociology Ph.D. student Joseph van der Naald, have begun work on a sponsored project funded by Social Security Administration (SSA) through a newly created national research center.
The center, the New York Retirement and Disability Research Center (NY RDRC), is a collaboration between the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research, Hunter College’s Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging, and The New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. The NY RDRC, established as part of the SSA’s Retirement and Disability Research Consortium, was awarded $1.9 million for its first year, with similar amounts expected in each of the following four years.
The NY RDRC will fund eleven projects by scholars at the Graduate Center, Hunter College, Baruch College, Queens College, and The New School. Gornick, Bruch, and van der Naald’s project will examine socio-economic and racial disparities across U.S. households related to the receipt of OASDI benefits (the program known widely as Social Security) and of SSI benefits (for individuals with disabilities and older adults who have little or no income or resources). The project will add to their past work on the relationship between institutional features of the social safety net and inequality in disposable income — the money households have available after they receive benefits through social programs. “We’re interested in how social programs shape socio-economic inequality across different kinds of households through the differences in the rate of receipt of benefits and in the amount of those benefits,” van der Naald says.
The researchers plan to focus on two types of households: multigenerational households that are headed by working-age adults and include elderly people, and households that are headed by elderly people. “One thing that we’re learning is that social security, which is for the elderly, is also an important anti-poverty income source for children, because a lot of kids live with their grandparents,” Gornick says. “There’s not much on that particular nuance in the literature.”
Another component of their research will focus on the disparities between centralized programs like OASDI and SSI that are controlled at the federal level — including power over financing, administration, and rule-making— and decentralized programs that are controlled primarily by the states. Rule-making for a social program can include how much money an individual receives, how they receive that money, and which individuals are eligible to receive it — regardless of actual need. “The decentralization of the safety net is itself a kind of inequality,” van der Naald says. “Just by the virtue of the fact that there are fifty states with their own sets of programs and rules and policymakers who make decisions.”
The other ten projects funded by the NY RDRC will focus on a wide spectrum of issues related to disparities in health, wealth, income, and social class that affect work quality for older adults, retirement income, and longevity. “It’s a really impressive consortium, and there are all of these cross-ties of collaboration,” says Gornick. “This gives us an enormous research community that we didn’t have before. We are also grateful for the funding from SSA, which will allow us to continue our work, extend our team to include research assistants, and present our work at three conferences.”
Read More:
- Poverty Reduction through Federal and State Policy Mechanisms: Variation Over Time and Across the U.S. States
- Geographic Disparities in the U.S. Social Safety Net: An Underexamined Dimension of Inequality