Separating Psychological Costs from Time Costs: Female Labor Supply and Participation in Food Stamps and WIC

Colleen Flaherty () and Kevin Mumford
Additional contact information
Colleen Flaherty: Department of Economics, Stanford University

No 06-024, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Many individuals who are eligible for welfare choose not to participate. This well-documented fact suggests that there is a utility cost associated with welfare participation. Previous studies have produced estimates of how large this cost would have to be to explain the observed degree of non-participation. Prior estimates of this utility cost have not differentiated psychological costs of participation from the time and effort required to become eligible and maintain eligibility (time costs). This paper develops a structural model that allows for the separate estimation of these two types of costs associated with welfare participation in dollar terms. The estimation suggests that psychological costs are three times larger than the time costs of welfare participation.

Keywords: welfare; psychological cost; time cost (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/06-024.pdf (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:sip:dpaper:06-024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).