Self-Targeting: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

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.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Journal of Political Economy

• Publication date

  2016-03-07

• Fields of study

  Business, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1086/685299
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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