Microeconomics Seminar with Tatiana Homonoff (NYU)

Eligible individuals often fail to enroll in safety net programs due to the administrative burden associated with applying. For example, in order to successfully enroll in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), all applicants must complete an interview with a case worker. These interviews are typically scheduled by the SNAP offices without consideration of the applicant's availability, resulting in high proportions of missed interviews and, in turn, application denials. In this paper, we study the impact of providing flexible, on-demand SNAP enrollment interviews. Using a field experiment involving over 60,000 applicants in Los Angeles County, we find that access to this alternative intake process expedited the approval process and increased participation rates: approval rates within a week of application submission doubled and long-term SNAP participation rates increased by 3 percentage points. We find no evidence that interview flexibility worsens program integrity; our results are driven by an increase in take-up amongst likely-eligible cases. Our findings have implications for the design of a variety of means-tested programs that rely on similar enrollment processes.  

Seminar will be in person and also held Virtually.  Please sign up for our seminars listserv to receive the details.