Most of the 600,000 adults returning to the community from state and federal prisons annually in the U.S. carry substantial debt, have low income and low education, and limited formal employment prior to entering prison. Upon reentry, they face financial hardship, high rates of morbidity and...

The COVID-19 related public health emergency led to federal legislation that changed the landscape of Medicaid coverage for low-income people in the United States. Beginning in 2020, policy responses led to a surge in Medicaid enrollment due to federal rules preventing Medicaid disenrollment,...

Following decades of increasing child access to public health insurance, enrollments fell in many states between 2016 and 2019 and the number of uninsured children increased. This study provides the first national, quantitative assessment of the role of several common types of administrative...

High administrative costs in U.S. health care have provoked concern among policymakers over potential waste, but many of these costs are generated by managed care policies that trade off bureaucratic costs against reductions in moral hazard. We study this trade-off for prior authorization...

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 participate and receive a benefit or service. We survey estimates of take-up of social benefits around the...

Stigma of welfare participation is important for policy and survey design, because it deters program take-up and increases misreporting. Stigma is also relevant to the literature on social image concerns, yet empirical evidence is scant because stigma is difficult to empirically identify. We use...

We are the first to document that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) caseworker behavior impacts program receipt, likely due to differing levels of helpfulness in navigating the complicated application process. We use the conditional random assignment of caseworkers as an...

How do administrative burdens influence enrollment in different welfare programs? Who is screened out at a given stage? This paper studies the impacts of increased administrative burdens associated with the automation of welfare caseworker assistance, leveraging a unique natural experiment in...

We investigate the relationship between welfare reform and health insurance, health care utilization, and self-reported measures of health status for women aged 20-45, using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. We present estimates from both...

Using data from the 1988-1996 Current Population Surveys (CPS), we re-examine the evidence presented in Yelowitz (1995) showing that expansions in Medicaid eligibility for children were associated with increased labor force participation and reduced participation in Aid to Families with...