Bounding the effects of food insecurity on children's health outcomes

Craig Gundersen and Brent Kreider ()

Journal of Health Economics, 2009, vol. 28, issue 5, 971-983

Abstract: Previous research has estimated that food insecure children are more likely to suffer from a wide array of negative health outcomes than food secure children, leading many to claim that alleviating food insecurity would lead to better health outcomes. Identifying the causal impacts is problematic, however, given endogenous selection into food security status and potential mismeasurement of true food security status. Using recently developed nonparametric bounding methods and data from the 2001-2006 National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES), we assess what can be identified about the effects of food insecurity on child health outcomes in the presence of nonrandom selection and nonclassical measurement error. Under relatively weak monotonicity assumptions, we can identify that food security has a statistically significant positive impact on favorable general health and being a healthy weight. Our work suggests that previous research has more likely underestimated than overestimated the causal impacts of food insecurity on health.

Keywords: Food; insecurity; Health; outcomes; Nonclassical; measurement; error; Nonparametric; bounds; Average; treatment; effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-6296(09)00070-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Bounding the effects of food insecurity on children’s health outcomes (2009)
Working Paper: Bounding the Effects of Food Insecurity on Children's Health Outcomes (2008)
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:eee:jhecon:v:28:y:2009:i:5:p:971-983

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().