SNAP Benefits and Crime: Evidence from Changing Disbursement Schedules

Jillian Carr and Analisa Packham
Additional contact information
Analisa Packham: Miami University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2019, vol. 101, issue 2, 310-325

Abstract: In this paper, we study the effects of the timing of nutritional aid disbursement on crime, using two main sources of variation: (a) a policy change in Illinois that substantially increased the number of SNAP distribution days and (b) an existing Indiana policy that issues SNAP benefits by last name. We find that staggering SNAP benefits leads to large reductions in crime and theft at grocery stores by 17.5% and 20.9%, respectively. Findings also show that theft decreases in the second and third weeks following receipt but increases in the last week of the benefit cycle due to resource constraints.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest_a_00757 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF 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:restat:v:101:y:2019:i:2:p:310-325

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().