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.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2015

DOI

10.1257/aer.20121493

Link

https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20121493

Cited from

cognitive_science, economics_finance

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.

• 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.

Verification

This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:12d86e19fd2d · see in the full table