Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/237470 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-1180
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
In this paper, we test whether promoting digital government tools increases the take-up of an important public health prevention service: cervical cancer screening. We implemented an at-scale field experiment in Uruguay, randomly encouraging women to make medical appointments with a digital application or reminding them to do it as usual at their local clinic. Using administrative records, we found that the digital application nearly doubled attendance of a screening appointment compared to reminders and tripled the rate compared to a pure control group (3.2 percentage point increase over a base of 1.9 percent). Survey data suggests that the impacts of the intervention were mostly mediated by reduced transaction costs. Our results highlight the potential of investing in digital government to improve the take-up of public services.
Subjects: 
information
transaction costs
public services
text messages
digital government
health outcomes
cancer screening
women
behavioral economics
field experiment
JEL: 
I12
I15
I18
D90
D91
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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