ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Communicating amounts in terms of commonly used budgeting periods increases intentions to claim government benefits.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Linkage of Emergency Department Patients With Public Benefits Navigators via Text Messages: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA health forum · 2026Trial
- Timing Matters: How Unconditional Cash Transfer Frequency Shapes Dietary Choices Among Vulnerable Older Adults.Health economics · 2026Article
- Interventions to bolster benefits take-up: Assessing intensity, framing, and targeting of government outreach.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Communicating amounts in terms of commonly used budgeting periods increases intentions to claim government benefits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Millions of eligible families did not claim their 2021 expanded child tax credit (CTC), collectively forgoing billions of dollars. To address this problem, many policymakers focused on increasing awareness of the CTC by highlighting that families could receive up to $3,600 a year per child. However, people rarely budget on a yearly basis. We propose that communicating the CTC benefit amount in terms of commonly used budgeting periods (e.g., $300 a month) instead of uncommonly used budgeting periods (e.g., $3,600 a year) could increase interest in claiming the CTC. Two large-scale field experiments ([Formula: see text]) among low-income individuals support this account. Using common (vs. uncommon) budgeting periods to describe CTC benefit amounts increased CTC claiming intentions by 16 to 26%. A third large-scale field experiment ([Formula: see text]) demonstrated that encouraging people to consider different budgeting periods moderated these effects. These results suggest that communicating amounts in terms of common budgeting periods is a simple, cost-effective way to stimulate interest in claiming government benefits.
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Registered trials
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