Attention vs Choice in Incomplete Welfare Take-Up: What Works for WIC?

Lei Bill Wang and Sooa Ahn

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We propose two approaches to decompose the reasons for welfare program non-participation among eligible households into two latent mechanisms: attention and choice. Approach I applies the attention-choice model from the consumer economics literature to the welfare take-up problem. Approach II incorporates random effects into Approach I, allowing for unobserved household-level heterogeneity and conditional dependence between attention and choice. We show that critical aspects of Approach II are semiparametrically identifiable through a novel strategy we call coherent shuffle. Applied to NLSY data for WIC participation, both approaches show that a choice-inducing solution is more effective in promoting take-up than an attention-raising solution. We validate our claims using the Vermont WIC2FIVE quasi-experimental data. The permutation test and DiD estimate strongly support that choice-inducing text messages are highly effective in retaining eligible households in the WIC program, while attention-raising text messages hardly have any effect on the retention rate.

Date: 2025-06, Revised 2025-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03457 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2506.03457

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().