Self-Targeting: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
By Vivi Alatas, Ririn Purnamasari, M. Wai-Poi, Abhijit Banerjee, Benjamin A. Olken, Rema Hanna. Journal of Political Economy, 2016
209 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper shows that adding a small application cost to a transfer program can substantially improve targeting through self-selection. Our village-level experiment in Indonesia finds that requiring beneficiaries to apply for benefits results in substantially poorer beneficiaries than automatic enrollment using the same asset test. Marginally increasing application costs on an experimental basis does not further improve targeting. Estimating a model of the application decision implies that the results are largely driven by the nonpoor, who make up the bulk of the population, forecasting that they are unlikely to pass the asset test and therefore not bothering to apply.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ea10392f291c1198565c80a3c8e2554995ba7a6
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- Esther Duflo
- Abhijit Banerjee
- Anna Lusardi
- Jacopo Ponticelli
- Dean S. Karlan
- Thorsten Beck
- Rohini Pande
- Todd Schoellman
In Gender Studies
- Esther Duflo
- Anna Lusardi
- Rohini Pande
- Michael Grossman
- Timothy J. Besley
- Siwan Anderson
- David Freedman
- B. Agarwal
In Safety Research
- Esther Duflo
- L. Pritchett
- N. Bau
- Michael Kremer
- Michael Grossman
- M. Ravallion
- Paul Schultz
- Guido W. Imbens
Citations in the corpus
- Network Structure and the Aggregation of Information: Theory and Evidence from Indonesia (2016, unknown): “The fact that ρr only matters for the effectiveness of community targeting when assessed using self-assessment is consistent with the experimental findings in Alatas et al. (2012). That paper also showed that in general, community meetings increased the rank correlation with self-assessment, but not”
- The Economist as Plumber (2017, background): “…and thus hopefully generate new interesting and important questions to work 8 For other examples of complex plumbing experiments with many treatments that look specifically at mechanisms, see Olken (2007); Alatas et al. (2012, 2016); Khan, Khwaja, and Olken (2016a); and Banerjee et al. (2012b). on.”