Project overviewssi recipients face daunting barriers to achieving self-sufficiency and securing employment

This $3,150,000 Cooperative Agreement awarded by the Social Security Administration (SSA) under the Social Security Research and Demonstration grant program (CFDA 96.007) will fund a three-phased randomized controlled trial (RCT) study conducted by the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab and the Illinois State Treasurer's Office. The study aims to promote the take-up and use of ABLE accounts among Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients in Illinois, with the goal of improving participants' financial security, self-sufficiency, and employment outcomes. The RCT will test various strategies to overcome barriers to ABLE account usage, including providing information, offering account seeding deposits, and implementing matching contributions. The researchers will utilize administrative data from SSA and the Illinois State Treasurer's Office, as well as survey data, to evaluate the impact of the ABLE account interventions on employment, earnings, and other outcomes over the 5-year project period.

In addition to living with significant disabilities, individual SSI recipients face a 2,000 limit on their countable financial assets ( 3,000 for couples), which might reduce the incentive for people to work and invest in their human capital. Able accounts offer people with disabilities the opportunity to accumulate assets and use funds for a broad range of expenses without threatening SSI benefits eligibility. Despite these advantages, able take-up is very low, with estimates suggesting as few as 1 percent of SSI recipients have an able account. We propose to conduct a three-phased randomized controlled trial (RCT) among illinois SSI recipients to promote take-up and use of able accounts, which we expect will improve participants financial security, self-sufficiency, and, ultimately, employment. The university of chicago inclusive economy lab (IEL) together with the illinois state treasurers office (ilsto) will partner to deliver and evaluate the intervention, building on our existing work helping people sign up for able accounts. Ilsto will lead the implementation while IEL will be the independent evaluator and be responsible for project management.each of the three phases of the intervention will seek to overcome one of three primary barriers to able take-up identified in our ongoing work: limited knowledge, administrative burdens, and limited resources. In the first phase, we will randomly assign SSI recipients to either an information group that gets multifaceted outreach about able and an invitation to participate in a survey or a control group that is not contacted at all. The survey will include informational materials about able. The second phase will focus on people who completed the survey we will randomly assign half of these survey completers to a seeding group. Members of this group will be offered 250 to be deposited in a new able account upon program sign up. The other half of survey completers, the no seeding group, receive only the informational materials. Finally, in the third phase, we will randomly assign all survey completers who opened a new able account to a matching group or no matching group. For the matching group, we will match all their contributions over the next three months at a rate of 1 for every 1 of new contributions, up to a maximum of 500 in matching contributions. This 1:1 match is psychologically salient and matches current legislative proposals such as the able match (making able a tool to combat hardship) act. The proposed act would offer the same 1:1 federal match for contributions to able accounts held by low-income individuals. Our team will use both administrative data and survey data to assess how able usage affects employment and other outcomes, such as a persons financial well-being. We will use ilsto administrative data to measure take-up and use of able accounts, SSA administrative data (through the master earnings file) to measure employment and earnings, and survey data to measure other outcome variables related to employment, human capital investments, financial well-being, and self-sufficiency. Critically, our study will rely on accessing contact information for those in the target population through SSA administrative data. Our proposed trial will generate rigorous causal evidence regarding strategies to overcome barriers to able take-up. Such evidence is essential to design policies to promote greater use of able accounts, and thus greater self-sufficiency and increased employment among SSI recipients. Our study is particularly timely given recent legislative proposals such as the able match act. Its importance is magnified by the eligibility expansion under the able age adjustment act scheduled for 2026, which will substantially increase the number of people eligible to open an account.