The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) in the US provides low-income families with assistance to purchase groceries at selected grocery stores. With a budget of $65B in 2018, it has historically been a large component of the social safety net in the US. However, Finkelstein and Notowidigdo (2019) note that program take up is relatively low among the elderly: only 42% of eligible elderly individuals receive SNAP, compared with 83% of eligible individuals overall. The authors note that this low take-up may be due to a lack of information about the program’s benefits and eligibility, or to application transaction costs such as gathering documents, filling out forms, and visiting application centers.
Finkelstein and Notowidigdo (2019) conduct an RCT with 30,000 likely eligible individuals in Pennsylvania to evaluate the impact of two types of treatments to increase SNAP take up by the elderly. They divide the sample into a control group and two treatment groups. The first treatment group (information only) receives a letter and follow up postcard reminder from the secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services (DHS) explaining likely eligibility and encouraging SNAP application. The second treatment group receives the same information treatment plus a phone number they can call to get phone-based assistance to apply. Authors find that the information only treatment increases take up, and that information plus assistance increases it even more, however with a higher cost per beneficiary.
The authors provide a framework to translate their estimates into their implied MVPFs for both experiments. The paper provides a detailed discussion of the MVPF calculation for the information only treatment, which is detailed on this site here. The authors also note that they provide an analogous MVPF calculation for their information + assistance treatment, which yields an MVPF of 0.92.
MVPF = 0.9
Finkelstein, A., & Notowidigdo, M. J. (2019). Take-up and targeting: Experimental evidence from SNAP. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(3), 1505-1556.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/3/1505/5484907