Professor Yue Li receives Best Paper Award

Professor Yue Li received the 2020 American Economics Journal Best Paper Prize. The award winning research is a joint project with Professor Manasi Deshpande at the University of Chicago, entitled "Who is Screened Out? Application Costs and the Targeting of Disability Programs" published in the American Economics Journal: Economic Policy in 2019. They measure the extent to which application costs for disability benefits affect who applies and gets aid from the program. Using administrative data, they compared the number and composition of applicants and recipients in areas where the nearest Social Security Administration office closed to those that didn't have an office closure until several years later. Closings led to a 16 percent decline in the number of disability recipients in surrounding areas, with the largest effects on applicants with moderately severe conditions and low education levels.