Researchers have struggled to explain why veterans participate in many public assistance programs at lower rates than nonveterans. The authors of this report detail an approach to answering this question that enables researchers to consistently estimate program participation differences across veteran and nonveteran populations. Focusing on U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Disability Compensation (VADC), the authors find that VADC eligibility and income—not just veteran status—primarily drive lower veteran participation in non-VADC public programs.
Using data from the three most widely used national surveys for studying program participation, the authors accounted for a variety of characteristics of households and heads of households—such as the size of the household, the number of children in it, and the household head’s race/ethnicity, sex, age, marital status, educational attainment, citizenship status, and disability status—to enable comparisons between otherwise similar veteran and nonveteran households. For each of the surveys used, the authors detail the survey’s strengths and weaknesses for researchers studying veterans’ economic outcomes.
The authors’ major conclusion is that income from VADC interacts in complicated ways with the rest of the social safety net. Because VADC income counts toward eligibility in some programs but not others, changes to VADC policy or to these other programs’ rules can have a variety of downstream effects on veterans. One consequence is that veterans receiving VADC benefits receive means-tested benefits at lower rates.
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