Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 74, No. 1

(released February 2014)
by Jeffrey Hemmeter

This article presents earnings and Social Security Administration (SSA) disability program payment outcomes for youths participating in SSA's Youth Transition Demonstration project. Participants were randomly assigned to treatment or control groups at each of six project sites. The author provides overviews of the project sites and compares treatment- and control-group youths' earnings 1 year and 2 years after random assignment, and disability program payment receipt 24 months after random assignment.

by Purvi Sevak and Lucie Schmidt

In this article, the authors use the Health and Retirement Study to compare retirement resources of the foreign born with those of the native born. They find that immigrants have significantly lower Social Security benefit levels than natives; however, after controlling for demographic characteristics immigrants have higher levels of net worth. The immigrant/native differential in retirement resources varies systematically by number of years in the United States.