Attention vs Choice in Welfare Take-Up: What Works for WIC?
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866917128587706368 |
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| author | Wang, Lei Bill Ahn, Sooa |
| author_facet | Wang, Lei Bill Ahn, Sooa |
| contents | Incomplete take-up of welfare benefits remains a major policy puzzle. This paper decomposes the causes of incomplete welfare take-up into two mechanisms: inattention, where households do not consider program participation, and active choice, where households consider participation but find it not worthwhile. To capture these two mechanisms, we model households' take-up decision as a two-stage process: attention followed by choice. Applied to NLSY97 data on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), our model reveals substantial household-level heterogeneity in both attention and choice probabilities. Furthermore, counterfactual simulations predict that choice-nudging policies outperform attention-boosting policies. We test this prediction using data from the WIC2Five pilot program that sent choice-nudging and attention-boosting text messages to different households. Consistent with the counterfactual prediction, choice-nudging messages increased retention much more effectively than attention-boosting messages. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03457 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Attention vs Choice in Welfare Take-Up: What Works for WIC? Wang, Lei Bill Ahn, Sooa General Economics Economics Incomplete take-up of welfare benefits remains a major policy puzzle. This paper decomposes the causes of incomplete welfare take-up into two mechanisms: inattention, where households do not consider program participation, and active choice, where households consider participation but find it not worthwhile. To capture these two mechanisms, we model households' take-up decision as a two-stage process: attention followed by choice. Applied to NLSY97 data on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), our model reveals substantial household-level heterogeneity in both attention and choice probabilities. Furthermore, counterfactual simulations predict that choice-nudging policies outperform attention-boosting policies. We test this prediction using data from the WIC2Five pilot program that sent choice-nudging and attention-boosting text messages to different households. Consistent with the counterfactual prediction, choice-nudging messages increased retention much more effectively than attention-boosting messages. |
| title | Attention vs Choice in Welfare Take-Up: What Works for WIC? |
| topic | General Economics Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03457 |