Free money? Why not?! Using a letter experiment to explain non-take-up of the Dutch supplementary grant
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2020-08-31
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en
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Literature distinguishes three major reasons for non-take-up of social benefits: (i) a lack of information, (ii) (perceived) complexity of application and (iii) psychological costs like stigma and (perceived) risks. This thesis uses an RCT to analyze whether these factors play a role for non-take-up of the Dutch supplementary student grant. We have tested whether sending emails that contained sentences designed to decrease perceived complexity and risks increase application rates compared those that received no email or a basic info mail without these specific sentences. Our results show that all interventions significantly increased take-up of the supplementary grant by up to 4.7pp compared to when no email was sent. This implies that there might have been some lack of information. Furthermore, only the combination of interventions had a significantly bigger impact of 2.0pp on application rates than the basic info mail. This could imply that either the population was too small to show significance for the separate effects or there is an interaction effect in place, which means a certain information threshold should be passed to convince students to apply. Furthermore, a questionnaire revealed that underlying perceptions did not change, suggesting that our interventions only have short-term behavioral effects and do not change perceptions.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen