IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crr/crrwps/wp2021-9.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Social Security Serve as an Economic Stabilizer?

Author

Listed:
  • Laura D. Quinby
  • Robert Siliciano
  • Gal Wettstein

Abstract

In times of economic distress, both individuals and localities can benefit from stable sources of income. While a large literature documents the benefits that individuals enjoy from guaranteed income such as Social Security, less attention has been given to the stabilizing force of Social Security at the community level. Intuitively, if many people are insulated from recessions through stable Social Security income, they will continue to demand local goods and services, propping up local employment and earnings. This paper uses the American Community Survey to estimate the extent to which Social Security benefits stabilize local economies, by examining how the relationship between a county’s economic outcomes and those of its surrounding counties vary with the share of county income from Social Security.

Suggested Citation

  • Laura D. Quinby & Robert Siliciano & Gal Wettstein, 2021. "Does Social Security Serve as an Economic Stabilizer?," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College wp2021-9, Center for Retirement Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2021-9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/does-social-security-serve-as-an-economic-stabilizer/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2021-9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Grzybowski or Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crrbcus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.