Investigating Treatment Effects of Participating Jointly in SNAP and WIC when the Treatment Is Validated Only for SNAP

The U.S. Department of Agriculture operates several food assistance programs aimed at alleviating food insecurity. We study whether participation in both participation in both SNAP and WIC alleviates food insecurity compared with participation in SNAP alone. We bound underlying causal effects by applying nonparametric treatment effect methods that allow for endogenous selection and underreported program participation when validation data are available for one program (treatment) but not the other. We estimate average treatment effects using data from the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS). FoodAPS includes administrative data to validate SNAP participation. Information on local food prices allows us to construct a food expenditure‐based monotone instrumental variable that does not require a typical instrumental variable exclusion restriction. Under relatively weak monotonicity assumptions, we identify that the impact of participating in both programs relative to SNAP alone is strictly positive, suggesting that the programs are nonredundant. This evidence can support improved design and targeting of food programs.     

The Impact of SNAP Vehicle Asset Limits on Household Asset Allocation

Beginning in 2001, states were given the authority to formulate their own rules on how vehicles are counted toward the asset limit in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. We exploit differences in timing of the state vehicle asset policy changes to identify their effect on vehicle assets and debts, car ownership, liquid assets holdings, as well as non‐housing wealth. We estimate difference‐in‐differences and household fixed effects specifications and find that liberalizing vehicle asset rules increases vehicle assets of households with a high ex ante probability of program participation. Households also take on more debt to finance their vehicles. The increase in car value can be attributed primarily to less educated single parents who already owned a car before the policy change buying more expensive cars.     

The Impact of SNAP on Material Hardships: Evidence From Broad‐Based Categorical Eligibility Expansions

This article examines whether expanding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility reduces material hardships of low‐income households. During the Great Recession, many states expanded the income threshold of eligibility for SNAP. I show that expansions in eligibility increased the SNAP participation rate by 3–5 percentage points. I also find that the expansion leads to a modest decrease in nonfood hardships, such as rent and utility delinquencies. However, the increase in SNAP enrollment does not lead to greater food spending or a reduction in food insecurity except for households with children.     

TAXING TIMES: STATE-LED INCOME REDISTRIBUTION IN NEW ZEALAND'S 'GOLDEN AGE'

Welfarism has been posited as central to how the state fostered the integration of the working class into the post-war economic order. However, analysis of national accounts data from 1949 to 1975 shows that New Zealand's welfare state redistributed income primarily from one fraction of the working class to another. That is, wage-earners financed their own collective consumption. This finding suggests that system integration effects of state welfare expenditure are predicated less on economic gains that accrue to labour, than they are on state-sponsored welfare discourse. Future research should therefore concentrate on both economic and discursive aspects of the welfare state.     

Food Access,Program Participation,and Health: Research Using FoodAPS

This piece is an introduction to the symposium on Food Access, Program Participation, and Health: Research using FoodAPS. The symposium includes articles presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Food Security on December 7 and 8, 2017. The research herein was supported by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, grant number 59‐5000‐5‐0115. The grant included funding to study the effects of various food assistance programs on outcomes, using data from the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS). We describe the programs and the FoodAPS data, and point out highlights from the articles.     

Estimating the Associations between SNAP and Food Insecurity,Obesity, and Food Purchases with Imperfect Administrative Measures of Participation

Administrative data are considered the “gold standard” when measuring program participation, but little evidence exists on their potential problems or implications for econometric estimates. We explore these issues using the FoodAPS, a unique data set containing two different administrative measures of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation and a survey‐based measure. We document substantial ambiguity in the two administrative measures and show that they disagree with each other almost as often as they disagree with self‐reported participation. Estimated participation and misreporting rates can be meaningfully sensitive to choices made to resolve this ambiguity and disagreement. We explore sensitivity in regression estimates of the associations between SNAP and food insecurity, obesity, and the healthy eating index. The signs are unchanged across the three measures, and the estimates are mostly not statistically different from each other. However, there are some meaningful differences in the magnitudes and levels of statistical significance of the estimates.     

Identification of Job Lock and Inefficient Labor Market Mobility

The common practice of linking employment with certain fringe benefits, notably health insurance, has long been thought to impede labor market mobility, thereby producing a phenomenon called job lock. A sizable literature has developed theoretical frameworks for how job lock impacts the labor market and empirically estimated the magnitudes of these effects. However, most empirical studies rely on identification strategies that do not separately identify productivity enhancing from productivity reducing labor market mobility. This article develops a simple theoretical framework showing how prior identification strategies confound both types of mobility and outlines conditions where productivity reducing mobility is of greatest concern.     

Does Increased Funding for Homeless Programs Reduce Chronic Homelessness?

This article tests whether programs that provide housing assistance to homeless people can reduce chronic homelessness. I analyze data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for 130 communities across the United States over the period 2005 to 2007. Because the amount of federal money allocated to a community to combat homelessness may depend on unobserved characteristics of that community, I estimate a fixed‐effects model that estimates the effect of new federal homeless funding on chronic homelessness. I find that the first‐year cost of moving one chronically homeless person into permanent supportive housing is $55,600. An analysis of new funding to specific types of homeless programs indicates that programs that provide long‐term housing and services to homeless people with disabilities drives this relationship.     

Welfare receipt and the intergenerational transmission of work‐welfare norms

This article investigates the role of welfare receipt in shaping norms regarding work and welfare using unique Australian data from the Youth in Focus Project. We begin by incorporating welfare into a theoretical model of the transmission of work‐welfare norms across generations. Consistent with the predictions of this model, we find evidence that youths' attitudes toward work and welfare may be influenced by socialization within their families. Young people are more likely to oppose generous social benefits and to believe that social inequality stems from individual characteristics if (i) their mothers support these views; (ii) their mothers were employed while they were growing up; and (iii) their families never received welfare. Finally, youths' work‐welfare norms appear to be unrelated to their neighbors' welfare receipt suggesting that socialization occurs primarily within families rather than within neighborhoods.     

Rasch Analyses of Very Low Food Security among Households and Children in the Three City Study

The longitudinal Three City Study (TCS) of low‐income families with children measures food hardships using fewer and some different questions from the standard U.S. instrument, the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) in the Current Population Survey (CPS). We use a Rasch measurement model to identify thresholds of very low food security among households and among children in the TCS that are comparable to thresholds from the HFSSM. We also use the TCS to empirically investigate the determinants of food insecurity and of these specific food insecurity outcomes, estimating a multivariate behavioral Rasch model that is adapted to address longitudinal data. The estimation results indicate that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program reduce food insecurity, while poverty and disability among caregivers increase it. Besides its longitudinal structure, the TCS measures many more characteristics about households than the CPS. Our estimates reveal that financial assistance through social networks and a household's own financial assets reduce food insecurity, while its outstanding loans increase insecurity.     

The Poverty of Politics: How Income Redistribution Hurts the Poor

In spite of the significant research literature identifying a tradeoff between income redistribution and economic growth, massive public programs have been implemented to help the poor by transferring income to them. Since Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty began in 1964, over 3.5 trillion dollars have been transferred. However, the possibility that everyone, including the poor, may in fact be made worse off by the transfer has largely been ignored. With a simple algebraic model, the authors demonstrate that, over time, both high and low-income groups are harmed by redistribution. In addition, social mobility, as well as political concerns with relative poverty and international income redistribution increases the damage to all income groups produced by redistribution.     

COST AND QUALITY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR HOME COMMUNITY-BASED CARE SERVICES TO ORPHANS AND VULNERABLE CHILDREN

The encouragement of care of orphans and vulnerable children by non-profit organisations (NPOs) is a major policy response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic in South Africa. The purpose of this article is to present a quality–cost model with five performance indicators for quality and two for costs and to test these against actual performance using data collected from nine rural and urban organisations in 2004 and 2005. Six NPOs had acceptable cost but all had unacceptable quality scores; three had unacceptable cost and unacceptable quality scores. Each rural caregiver had many more orphans and vulnerable children beneficiaries than their urban counterparts but made fewer total visits. As a result, urban beneficiaries received, on average, 3.5 times more visits than their rural counterparts. The results suggest the need for different performance indicators and expectations for rural and urban NPOs and that monitoring and evaluation using the model could improve horne community-based care services.     

Health insurance generosity and conditional coverage: Evidence from medicaid managed care in Kentucky

This article estimates the impact of the introduction of Medicaid managed care (MMC) on the formal Medicaid participation of children. We employ a quasi‐experimental approach exploiting the location‐specific timing of MMC implementation in Kentucky. Using data from the March Current Population Survey from 1995 to 2003, our findings suggest that the introduction of MMC increases the likelihood of being uninsured and decreases formal Medicaid participation. This finding is consistent with an increase in “conditional coverage,” waiting until medical care is needed to sign up or re‐enroll in Medicaid. These effects are concentrated among low‐income children and absent for high‐income children. We find no evidence of “crowd‐in,” substituting private coverage for Medicaid. These results are robust to multiple placebo tests and imply the potential for less formal participation (i.e., more conditional coverage) among the Affordable Care Act‐Medicaid expansion population (which is likely to be primarily covered under MMC) than is typically predicted.     

Informal Credit,Usury, or Support? A Case Study for Vietnam

The informal credit market remains an important source of finance for the poor in Vietnam. Yet, little if anything is known about the impact of informal loans on poverty and inequality, and the Vietnamese government has no policies towards the informal credit market. In the present study paper, we found that the effect of credit from friends and relatives on per capita expenditure is positive but not statistically significant. Meanwhile, the effect of credit from private moneylenders on per capita expenditure is positive and statistically significant. Borrowing from private moneylenders increases per capita expenditure of households by around 15%. Further, it reduced the poverty incidence of borrowers by around 8.5 percentage points in 2006 and significantly decreases the poverty gap index and the poverty‐severity index. Borrowing from private moneylenders also reduces expenditure inequality, albeit at a very small magnitude.     

Institutions and the rise of taxes on labour in the OECD

Institutions and the Rise of Taxes on Labour in the OECD. —The aim of this paper is to explain differences among OECD countries in the evolution of taxes on labour during the last two decades. Its main message is that these taxes are to an important extent structurally and institutionally determined. Tax rates on labour are shown to have risen more strongly in countries where: (i) government has been controlled mainly by leftist parties; (ii) taxes (in general) are decided and collected mainly by central government (fiscal centralization); (iii) coalition and minority governments are frequent; (iv) the partisan composition (political colour) of these coalitions is unstable; (v) the labour market is neither centralized nor decentralized.     

Finding the Benefits: Estimating the Impact of The South African Child Support Grant

This paper estimates the impact of the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) on child health, nutrition and education. Data from the 2008 South African National Income Dynamics Study are used to estimate the impact of the CSG on six different outcomes measuring child well‐being. We find a positive treatment effect of the CSG on children's height‐for‐age, progress through the school system, as well as household expenditure on food items using a continuous treatment estimator developed by Hirano and Imbens. Robustness analysis using the inverse probability weighting approach by Flores and Mitnik is also implemented. Although these estimates provide some evidence of a positive impact resulting from the CSG, they are not conclusive in showing that the cash transfers are spent mainly on improving the lives of beneficiary children, as the treatment effects are quite small.     

Does School Lunch Fill the “SNAP Gap” at the End of the Month?

This article investigates the relationship between the timing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit payments and participation in school lunch and breakfast using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey. An event study approach examines participation over the five‐day window before and after the SNAP payment. We find that school lunch participation decreases by 17–23 percentage points immediately after the SNAP payment among 11–18 year olds while breakfast drops by 19–36 percentage points. The decline begins the day prior to payment. We find no effects for 5–10 year olds. Models examining participation over the full SNAP month using individual fixed effects yield similar findings. Among teenagers, participation in school lunch and breakfast decline in the first two weeks of the SNAP month, increasing afterward. Non‐school meals show the opposite pattern. Overall, results indicate SNAP households rely more on school lunch and breakfast toward the end of the SNAP month.     

The Impact of Federal Homelessness Funding on Homelessness

Federal spending on homelessness has increased significantly in recent years. I estimate the relationship between federal homelessness funding and homeless counts in 2011, 2013, and 2015 cross sections. I instrument for funding using a community's pre‐1940 housing share, a key variable in an originally unrelated funding formula borrowed for homelessness grants. Funding increases sheltered homelessness; meanwhile, funding is unrelated to unsheltered homelessness. Lower bound estimates suggest that the minimum cost of reducing unsheltered homelessness has increased over time, from $16,400 in 2011 to $20,800 in 2013 to $50,000 in 2015. In 2013, an additional $1 thousand dollars corresponds to a .309 higher homeless rate per 10,000 people. The effect is larger for families than individuals. Funding is positively related to chronic homelessness and is unrelated to youth and child homelessness. My results suggest limitations on federal funding's ability to reduce homelessness among some of the most marginalized groups in society.     

The Effect of SNAP and School Food Programs on Food Security,Diet Quality,and Food Spending: Sensitivity to Program Reporting Error

There is an extensive research literature on the effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on food‐related outcomes which has shown somewhat mixed results but generally favorable effects. However, most of the research has used data sets whose information on SNAP participation is gathered from responses on household surveys, and such responses are subject to reporting error. This study uses the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey data set to examine the effect of reporting error on food‐related outcomes, for that data set contains information on SNAP participation gathered from government administrative records. Our analysis shows that the degree of reporting error is small and has little effect on the estimated impact of participation in the SNAP program on food security, diet quality, and food spending. A supplemental analysis of the effect of school food programs likewise shows no difference in using survey or administrative data in the analysis.     

Identifying the Effects of WIC on Food Insecurity Among Infants and Children

The Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program is considered a crucial component of the social safety net in the United States, yet there is limited supporting evidence on the effects of WIC on the nutritional well‐being and food security of infants and young children. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we apply recently developed partial identification methods to jointly account for unobserved counterfactual outcomes and systematic underreporting of WIC participation. Under nonparametric assumptions, we find that WIC reduces the prevalence of child food insecurity by at least 3.6 percentage points (20%).