Food Insecurity and Homelessness in the Journeys Home Survey

Nicolas Hérault and David Ribar

Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Abstract: Homelessness not only deprives people of comfort, safety, and dignity but may also cause other problems, including food insecurity. In this study, we use data from the Journeys Home survey, a large national longitudinal survey of disadvantaged Australians who were homeless or at risk of homelessness, to estimate multivariate ordered categorical variable models of the association between homelessness and food insecurity. The Journeys Home survey includes an extensive set of measures of people’s circumstances that we include in our models. We also estimate dummy endogenous variable specifications. All our specifications indicate that homelessness is associated with higher (worse) food insecurity for men. We also find unconditional associations in the same direction for women, but these become statistically insignificant when we include extensive sets of observed controls in our models or estimate dummy endogenous variable specifications. We also investigate how homelessness is related to food consumption, meal consumption, and food expenditures. Food expenditures are negatively associated with homelessness for men in all our specifications; however, the other food outcomes for men and women do not show consistent, statistically significant associations.

Keywords: Food insecurity; food consumption; food expenditures; homelessness; Journeys Home survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46pp
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/downloads ... series/wp2016n15.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Food insecurity and homelessness in the Journeys Home survey (2017)
Working Paper: Food Insecurity and Homelessness in the Journeys Home Survey (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iae:iaewps:wp2016n15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sheri Carnegie ().