Kathleen Mullen is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and director of the RAND Center for Disability Research; she is also an associate director of the Economics, Sociology and Statistics Department and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her work addresses the economics of retirement, health, and disability, with an emphasis on the incentive effects of social insurance programs such as Social Security and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). In her research, Mullen has employed a variety of research designs applying both reduced form and structural econometric methods. She has pursued research on, among other things, the effects of SSDI receipt on labor supply; the effects of long waiting times on the subsequent labor force participation and earnings of rejected SSDI applicants; how changes in eligibility requirements affect SSDI or Social Security claiming; and the effects of changes in Social Security or disability insurance incentives in other countries on labor supply for workers at older ages, and what those findings suggest about potential evaluations of reforms in the United States. Mullen received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Selected Publications
Mullen, Kathleen J. and Stefan Staubli, "Disability Benefit Generosity and Labor Force Withdrawal," Journal of Public Economics, 143:49-63, 2016
Hill, Matthew J., Nicole Maestas and Kathleen J. Mullen, "Employer Accommodation and Labor Supply of Disabled Workers," Labour Economics, 41:291-303, 2016
Maestas, Nicole, Kathleen J. Mullen and Alexander Strand, "Disability Insurance and the Great Recession," American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, 105(5):177-182, 2015
Manoli, Dayanand S., Kathleen J. Mullen and Mathis Wagner, "Policy Variation, Labor Supply Elasticities and a Structural Model of Retirement," Economic Inquiry, 53(4):1702-1717, 2015
Maestas, Nicole, Kathleen J. Mullen and Alexander Strand, "Disability Insurance and Health Insurance Reform: Evidence from Massachusetts," American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, 104(5):329-335, 2014
Maestas, Nicole, Kathleen J. Mullen and Alexander Strand, "Does Disability Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt," American Economic Review, 103(5):1797-1829, 2013
Hurd, Michael D., Paco Martorell, Adeline Delavande, Kathleen J. Mullen and Kenneth M. Langa, "Monetary Costs of Dementia in the United States," The New England Journal of Medicine, 368:1326-1334, 2013
