Matching to Categories: Learning and Compliance Costs in Administrative Processes

Research with Code for America on CalFresh, by Donald Moynihan, Eric Giannella, Pamela Herd, and Julie Sutherland finds "hard evidence on the barriers administrative burdens pose."

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"[W]e undertook a field experiment in a California welfare program, CalFresh, the state version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Claimants often fail to select into the category of “self-employed” even though it would be more favorable for them to do so. We show how a more intuitive presentation of information about the category and its benefits increased the rate of those identifying as self-employed from 8.8% to 12.1%, approximately one-third. We also show that providing a simple self-attestation template to convey information about self-employment status, a means of reducing compliance costs while meeting state documentation requirements, increased the number of claimants providing an acceptable form of documentation to match to the category. The results show that people frequently lack an intuitive understandingof state categories, that the presentation of categories can reduce this matching problem, and that the state can make it easier to document the match."