The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest nutritional safety net in the United States. Prior research has found that participants have higher consumption shortly after receiving their benefits, followed by lower consumption towards the end of the benefit month. This “SNAP benefit cycle” has been found to have negative effects on beneficiaries.
The objective of the study was to determine relationship between neighborhood food store availability, store choice and food purchasing habits among Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participating households. The study sample consisted of SNAP households (n=1581) and low income households participating in the USDA's National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) a nationally representative cross-sectional survey of American households with household food purchases and acquisitions data.
Higher food prices may aggravate household food insecurity and hurt diet quality. Using a sample of low-income households from the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS), this study examines whether local food prices affect food insecurity and nutritional quality of foods acquired, and how households use competent consumer behaviors to mitigate any adverse effects of price. Financial management practices, nutrition literacy, and conscientious food shopping practices were considered for consumer competency.
We tested the hypothesis that high costs of living, such as from high housing rents, reduce the healthfulness of food acquisitions.
This paper examines the relationship between SNAP participation and prices paid for food items. To test this relationship, we develop an expensiveness index following the method of Aguiar and Hurst (2007) and use the FoodAPS data set. Using both the ordinary least squares method and controlling for endogeneity using an instrumental variables approach, we found SNAP participation did not hold a statistically significant relationship with the prices paid for food items when we controlled for consumer behavior and food market variables.
In this paper, we describe the relationship between SNAP and food consumption. We first present the neoclassical framework for analyzing in-kind transfers, which unambiguously predicts that SNAP will increase food consumption, and follow this with an explanation of the SNAP benefit formula. We then present new evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey on food spending patterns among households overall, SNAP households, and other subgroups of interest. We find that a substantial fraction of SNAP households spend an amount that is above the program’s needs standard.
Receipt of benefits from other traditional transfer programs by SNAP families is common, with 76 percent of those families receiving at least one other major benefit of that type, excluding Medicaid, in 2008. However, over half of these only received one other benefit and only a very small fraction received more than two others. Over the long-term, multiple benefit receipt among SNAP families has been falling, a result of declines in the TANF caseload offsetting rises in the SSI, SSDI, and WIC caseloads.
Much of the evidence about the effects of SNAP on nutrition is based on cross-sectional studies comparing SNAP recipients and eligible non-recipients, and thus potentially biased, even when observables are controlled. There is evidence suggesting SNAP recipients spend more on food than other similar families and that they have higher nutrient availability than others.
This chapter reviews recent theory and empirical evidence regarding the effect of SNAP on food insecurity and replicates the modelling strategies used in the empirical literature. The authors find that recent evidence suggesting an ameliorative effect of SNAP on food insecurity may not be robust to specification choice or data. Most specifications mirror the existing literature in finding a positive association of food insecurity with SNAP participation.
The Great Recession and its immediate aftermath have brought increasing attention both to food insecurity among children and to the associated food safety net. This chapter examines how SNAP functions as a component of the broader food assistance safety net for school-age children, focusing on connections between SNAP and the school meal programs at a policy level, as well patterns in children’s participation across programs. Food assistance programs are a mainstay of children’s overall household resources.