What Can We Learn about the Effects of Food Stamps on Obesity in the Presence of Misreporting?

Lorenzo Almada, Ian McCarthy and Rusty Tchernis

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2016, vol. 98, issue 4, 997-1017

Abstract: There is an increasing perception among policy makers that food stamp benefits contribute positively to adult obesity rates. We show that these results are heavily dependent on one’s assumptions regarding the accuracy of reported food stamp participation. When allowing for misreporting, we find no evidence that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participation significantly increases the probability of being obese or overweight among adults. Our results also highlight the inherent bias and inconsistency of common point estimates when ignoring misreporting, with treatment effects from instrumental variable methods exceeding the nonparametric upper bounds by over 200% in some cases.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aaw017 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: What Can We Learn About the Effects of Food Stamps on Obesity in the Presence of Misreporting? (2015)
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:oup:ajagec:v:98:y:2016:i:4:p:997-1017.

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().