Does Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Reduce Food Insecurity among Households with Children? Evidence from the Current Population Survey

Jun Zhang, Yanghao Wang and Steven T. Yen
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Jun Zhang: School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Yanghao Wang: Global Data Insight and Analytics, Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, MI 48126, USA
Steven T. Yen: School of Economics, Jianxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang 330013, China

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 6, 1-15

Abstract: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is designed to improve household diet and food security—a pressing problem confronting low-income families in the United States. Previous studies on the issue often ignored the methodological issue of endogenous program participation. We revisit this important issue by estimating a simultaneous equation system with ordinal household food insecurity. Data are drawn from the 2009–2011 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS), restricted to SNAP-eligible households with children. Our results add to the stocks of empirical findings that SNAP participation ameliorates food insecurity among adults only, but increases the probabilities of low and very low food security among children. These contradictory results indicate that our selection approach with a single cross section is only partially successful, and that additional efforts are needed in further analyses of this complicated issue, perhaps with longitudinal data. Socio-demographic variables are found to affect food-secure households and food-insecure households differently, but affect SNAP nonparticipants and participants in the same direction. The state policy tools, such as broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE) and simplified reporting, can encourage SNAP participation and thus ameliorate food insecurity. Our findings can inform policy deliberations.

Keywords: SNAP participation; food insecurity; ordered probability model; household with children (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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