Psychological Frictions and the Incomplete Take-Up of Social Benefits¶
Bhargava, S., & Manoli, D. (2015). Psychological Frictions and the Incomplete Take-Up of Social Benefits: Evidence from an IRS Field Experiment. American Economic Review, 105(11), 3489-3529.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Invisible Affordance
- Adding a line to an employer's W-2 envelope to surface a refundable tax credit is structurally the same intervention as adding an undocumented keyboard shortcut to a tutorial, adding a vacant statutory remedy to a lawyer-training curriculum, or putting a sign at a forest fork indicating water — in each case the capability already exists and the move is to put the announcement on the surface the population actually samples.
This sourceField experiment showing that simplifying and re-surfacing the announcement of the EITC raises take-up, demonstrating non-take-up as a visibility/announcement failure remediable by moving the announcement onto a sampled surface.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The experiment shows a re-surfaced mailing raised EITC claiming, backing the announcement/visibility leg, but not the claim's asserted structural equivalence across four interventions.
“While the mere receipt of the mailing, simplification, and the heightened salience of benefits led to substantial additional claiming, attempts to reduce perceived costs of stigma, application, and audits did not.”
- Adding a line to an employer's W-2 envelope to surface a refundable tax credit is structurally the same intervention as adding an undocumented keyboard shortcut to a tutorial, adding a vacant statutory remedy to a lawyer-training curriculum, or putting a sign at a forest fork indicating water — in each case the capability already exists and the move is to put the announcement on the surface the population actually samples.
- Screening
- Empirical work on welfare take-up (Currie 2006; Bhargava and Manoli 2015
This sourceField experiment demonstrating that simplification and salience interventions can materially raise take-up of means-tested benefits, supporting the view that some friction is not informative screening but recoverable deadweight cost.
- Empirical work on welfare take-up (Currie 2006; Bhargava and Manoli 2015
Verification¶
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