published in: A.J. Auerbach et al. (eds), Public policy and the income distribution, New York: Russel Sage, 2006
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.
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