IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/uerscc/292080.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Much Does Snap Reduce Food Insecurity?

Author

Listed:
  • Ratcliffe, Caroline
  • McKernan, Signe-Mary

Abstract

Although the United States has one of the highest standards of living in the world, nearly 15 percent of all households and 39 percent of near-poor households were food insecure in 2008. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the Food Stamp Program) is the cornerstone of federal food assistance programs and serves as the first line of defense against food-related hardship, such as food insecurity. Using the 1996, 2001, and 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panels, this paper measures SNAP’s effectiveness in reducing food insecurity using a dummy endogenous variable model with instrumental variables to control for selection bias. Recent changes in state SNAP policies and rules provide exogenous variation, which we use to control for selection into the program. Results from naïve models that do not control for the endogeneity of SNAP receipt show that SNAP receipt is associated with higher food insecurity. However, instrumental variable models that control for the endogeneity of SNAP receipt suggest that SNAP receipt reduces the likelihood of being food insecure by roughly 30 percent and reduces the likelihood of being very food insecure by 20 percent. These findings provide evidence that SNAP is meeting its key goal of reducing food-related hardship.

Suggested Citation

  • Ratcliffe, Caroline & McKernan, Signe-Mary, 2010. "How Much Does Snap Reduce Food Insecurity?," Contractor and Cooperator Reports 292080, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:uerscc:292080
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.292080
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/292080/files/ccr-60.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.292080?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Nord, Mark & Coleman-Jensen, Alisha & Andrews, Margaret & Carlson, Steven, 2010. "Household Food Security in the United States, 2009," Economic Research Report 262246, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    2. Zhang, Jun & Yen, Steven T., 2017. "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and food insecurity among families with children," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 52-64.
    3. Zekeri, Andrew A. & Diabate, Youssouf, 2014. "Food Insecurity And Psychological Well-Being Among Women Living With Hiv/Aids On Antiretroviral Therapy In The Alabama Black Belt," Professional Agricultural Workers Journal (PAWJ), Professional Agricultural Workers Conference, vol. 2(1), pages 1-9.
    4. Kathryn Edin & Melody Boyd & James Mabli & Jim Ohls & Julie Worthington & Sara Greene & Nicholas Redel & Swetha Sridharan, "undated". "SNAP Food Security In-Depth Interview Study," Mathematica Policy Research Reports cad6b24b82bd4318b8459c8ef, Mathematica Policy Research.
    5. Nord, Mark & Prell, Mark, 2011. "Food Security Improved Following the 2009 ARRA Increase in SNAP Benefits," Economic Research Report 262242, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    6. Davis, David E. & Huang, Rui, 2013. "The Real Effect of SNAP Benefits for Food Insecurity," SDSU Working Papers in Progress 13001, South Dakota State University, Department of Economics.
    7. Austin Nichols, 2011. "Causal inference for binary regression with observational data," CHI11 Stata Conference 6, Stata Users Group.
    8. Udaya R. Wagle, 2012. "The Food Stamps Program and Economic Security Among Low‐Income Families, Part I," Poverty & Public Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 4(4), pages 223-238, December.
    9. Coleman-Jensen, Alisha & Nord, Mark & Andrews, Margaret S. & Carlson, Steven, 2011. "Household Food Security in the United States in 2010," Economic Research Report 118021, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    10. Xu, Lei & Plakias, Zoë, 2022. "The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Food Insecurity, and Fruit and Vegetable Consumption in Appalachian Ohio," 2022 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Anaheim, California 322370, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    11. Kyung Min Kang & Robert A. Moffitt, 2019. "The Effect of SNAP and School Food Programs on Food Security, Diet Quality, and Food Spending: Sensitivity to Program Reporting Error," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 86(1), pages 156-201, July.
    12. Rigdon, Joseph & Berkowitz, Seth A. & Seligman, Hilary K. & Basu, Sanjay, 2017. "Re-evaluating associations between the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participation and body mass index in the context of unmeasured confounders," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 192(C), pages 112-124.
    13. Di Fang & Michael R. Thomsen & Rodolfo M. Nayga & Wei Yang, 2022. "Food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from a survey of low-income Americans," Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, Springer;The International Society for Plant Pathology, vol. 14(1), pages 165-183, February.
    14. Jun Zhang & Yanghao Wang & Steven T. Yen, 2021. "Does Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Reduce Food Insecurity among Households with Children? Evidence from the Current Population Survey," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(6), pages 1-15, March.

    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:ags:uerscc:292080. 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: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ersgvus.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.