A Geography of Administrative Burden: Accessibility to Social Security Field Offices and Benefit Receipt

• In Event: Factors Associated with Administrative Burdens and Their Relief

Abstract

Geographic access to the offices where citizens apply for public benefits shapes the administrative burden of claiming them, yet few studies measure that access, and fewer still test whether it tracks benefit receipt. This study measures geographic accessibility to the Social Security Administration (SSA) field offices in the United States using the Enhanced Two-Step Floating Catchment Area method and asks whether the resulting index behaves as a measure of administrative burden should. Approximately 2.7 million residents live in 933 tracts where no SSA field office is reachable within the 120-minute catchment. Accessibility is positively and significantly associated with receipt of Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance, two programs that impose enough documentation and review burden to make an office visit likely, but not with receipt of retired-worker benefits, which the agency determines from a work record it already holds. That contrast holds under a spatial error specification and across four distance decay functions. Applying the measure to 16 announced field office closures would leave 167,317 residents with no reachable office.

Authors

• Pyung Kim, University of California, Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Peter Kedron, University of California, Santa Barbara
  Non-Presenting Co-Author