The Take Up of Social Benefits

Janet Currie

No 10488, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper offers a review of recent literature regarding the take up of social programs in the U.S. and U.K. A few general conclusions are drawn: First, take up is enhanced by automatic or default enrollment and lowered by administrative barriers, although removing individual barriers does not necessarily have much effect, suggesting that one must address the whole bundle. Second, although it may be impossible to devise a definitive test of the stigma hypothesis', other, more concrete types of transactions costs are probably a good deal more important. Third, although people generally have means-tested programs in the United States in mind when they discuss take up, low take up is also a problem in many non means-tested social insurance programs and in other countries. Historically, economists have paid little attention to rules about eligibility, and virtually no attention to how these rules are enforced or made known to eligibles. Hence, the marginal return to new data about these features of programs is likely to be high in terms of understanding take up. In an era of social experiments, it might also prove useful to consider experimental manipulations of factors thought to influence take up.

JEL-codes: I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-05
Note: LS PE CH
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (148)

Published as “The Take-up of Social Benefits,” in Alan Auerbach, David Card, and John Quigley (eds). In Poverty, The Distribution of Income, and Public Policy, (New York: Russell Sage), 2006, 80-148.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10488.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Take-Up of Social Benefits (2004)
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:nbr:nberwo:10488

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10488

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().