This paper analyzes how variation in participant take-up rates affected the impacts of the New Hope project, a random-assignment, anti-poverty program. New Hope offered experimental members four benefits - child care subsidies, wage subsidies, health insurance, and, if needed, a temporary community service job - that were available to families working 30 or more hours per week. Despite the generosity of the program and supportive caseworkers, take-up was far from universal and participants who took up at least some benefits rarely took up all of them. Clustering and propensity score methods are used to identify take-up sub-groups and to estimate program impacts within these take-up strategies. Five distinct sub-groups are identified, including three oriented around the supplement-based benefits and one that did not formally participate. All strategies adopted by New Hope experimental members were associated with at least one positive program impact. However, the primary New Hope beneficiaries were those parents who used the community service jobs. They increased their employment effort, felt less stressed, and had children with higher teacher-related academic accomplishment scores.
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Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. in its series Working Papers with number
968.