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This paper studies the impacts of administrative burdens across multiple welfare programs and
application stages via an increasingly widespread phenomenon: the automation of caseworker
assistance. Leveraging a natural experiment phased in across Indiana’s counties and administrative
records for 3 million recipients, we find that SNAP, TANF, and Medicaid enrollments fell by
15%, 24%, and 4% after automation. Heterogeneous declines are attributable to cross-program
differences in recertification costs. Needier individuals exited while less needy individuals
were screened out at entry, potentially reconciling some conflicting results in the literature and
best understood through a dynamic selection model of certification and recertification.
