Caroline Welter
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics and Graduate Research Assistant at the Regional Research Institute at WVU .
Hello there, welcome to my website!
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at West Virginia University, currently in my 5th year and on the 2025–26 job market.
My research lies at the intersection of Health Economics and Urban & Regional Economics, with a focus on how place and policy design shape access to public programs, health, and economic opportunity.
Methodologically, I use causal inference with administrative, spatial, and survey data to study distributional effects across rural and digitally underserved populations.
Featured: Job Market Paper
The Impact of SSA Field Office Closures on Disability Program Participation
This paper estimates how the nationwide closures of Social Security Administration (SSA) field offices during the COVID-19 lockdown affected participation in disability benefit programs. I exploit these closures as a natural experiment using a difference-in-differences design.
Closures reduced new disability beneficiaries by 2.3% overall, with larger declines in non-metropolitan areas (–9.4%) and low-internet communities (–6.65%), showing that in-person administrative access remains vital for vulnerable populations.