IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29055.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Note on the Level of Customer Support by State Governments: A Mystery-Shopping Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Oeindrila Dube
  • Sendhil Mullainathan
  • Devin G. Pope

Abstract

Many government services are provided at the state level such as unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and SNAP. Given the lack of competition, a natural worry is that customer support provided by states for these services is less than adequate. While there are many different measures of how a state can support beneficiaries, we focus on just one in this short and applied report: the ability to get a live representative on the phone to help with an application question. To do this, we take a “mystery shopping” approach and make 2,000 phone calls to state government offices. We find substantial heterogeneity in the availability of live phone representatives across states and types of service (UI, Medicaid, etc.). For example, live representatives in New Jersey and Georgia were reached less than 20% of the time while representatives in New Hampshire and Wisconsin were reached more than 80% of the time. We hope that this report provides a simple example for how academics, investigative reporters, and watch groups can help states be more accountable for their customer support systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Oeindrila Dube & Sendhil Mullainathan & Devin G. Pope, 2021. "A Note on the Level of Customer Support by State Governments: A Mystery-Shopping Approach," NBER Working Papers 29055, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29055
    Note: LS PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29055.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dillon Bowen, 2022. "Bayesian ranking and selection with applications to field studies, economic mobility, and forecasting," Papers 2208.02038, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29055. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.