Eat (and Drink) Better Tonight: Food Stamp Benefit Timing and Drunk Driving Fatalities

Chad Cotti, John Gordanier and Orgul Ozturk
Additional contact information
John Gordanier: University of South Carolina

American Journal of Health Economics, 2016, vol. 2, issue 4, 511-534

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between the timing of food stamp benefits and daily alcohol-related fatal accidents. We exploit substantial exogenous variation in state food stamp distribution dates and enrollment numbers to estimate the relationship using binary outcome and count data frameworks. Our main result is that, in contrast to previous work on income receipt and mortality, alcohol-related accidents with fatalities are substantially lower on the date of food stamp receipt, and the result is largely driven by a same-day effect. Further, this effect is only present on weekdays. We find no effect of receipt on non-alcohol-related accidents. We hypothesize that this is possibly driven by families being more likely to eat at home on distribution days.

Keywords: SNAP benefits; food stamps; EBT; drunk driving (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I38 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AJHE_a_00059 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:amjhec:v:2:y:2016:i:4:p:511-534

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by Thomas Buchmueller

More articles in American Journal of Health Economics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().