We discuss the potential role of universal basic incomes (UBIs) in advanced countries. A
feature of advanced economies that distinguishes them from developing countries is the …

Take-up of a social benefit is usually defined as receiving a benefit for which an individual or
household is eligible. The take-up rate is the fraction of those eligible for a program who …

Winner of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award Presented by the Public and Nonprofit Section
of the National Academy of Management Winner of the 2019 Louis Brownlow Book Award …

One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens
that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from …

The COVID-19 crisis has led to spiking unemployment rates with disproportionate impacts
on low-income families. School and child-care center closures have also meant lost free-and …

We develop a framework for welfare analysis of interventions designed to increase take-up
of social safety net programs in the presence of potential behavioral biases. We calibrate the …

Administrative burdens are the frictions that people face in their encounters with public
services, leading to meaningful costs that include learning, compliance, and psychological …

We study the effect of application costs on the targeting of disability programs. We identify
these effects using the closings of Social Security Administration field offices, which provide …

We address the role of “psychological frictions” in the incomplete take-up of EITC benefits
with an IRS field experiment. We specifically assess the influence of program confusion …

Recent evidence suggests that vaccination hesitancy is too high in many countries to
sustainably contain COVID-19. Using a factorial survey experiment administered to 20,500 …