Quantifying the mortality impact of the 1935 old-age assistance
利用美国各州老年援助计划的差异，发现该计划使65岁以上老年人死亡率降低30%至39%，主要减少了流感和肾炎等传染病死亡。
Abstract In 1935, the United States introduced the old-age assistance (OAA) program, a means-tested program to help the elderly poor. The OAA improved retirement conditions and aimed to enable older persons to live independently. We use the transition from early elderly plans to OAA and the large differences in payments and eligibility across states to show that OAA reduced mortality by between 30 and 39 percent among those older than 65 years. This finding, based on an event study design, is robust to a range of specifications, a range of fixed effects, placebo tests, and a border-pair policy discontinuity design using county-level data. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases, such as influenza and nephritis, and mostly affected white citizens.