Targeting with In-Kind Transfers: Evidence from Medicaid Home Care
研究了实物转移支付在降低受助者价值的同时如何改善瞄准效果，以医疗补助家庭护理为例，发现瞄准收益超过扭曲成本，对灵活福利改革有重要启示。
Making a transfer in kind reduces its value to recipients but can improve targeting. We develop an approach to quantifying this tradeoff and apply it to home care. Using randomized experiments by Medicaid, we find that in-kind provision significantly reduces the value of the transfer to recipients while targeting a small fraction of the eligible population that is sicker and has fewer informal care-givers than the average eligible. Under a wide range of assumptions within a standard model, the targeting benefit exceeds the distortion cost. This highlights an important cost of recent reforms toward more flexible benefits.