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

Chad Cotti, John Gordanier and Orgul Ozturk
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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
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:amjhec:v:2:y:2016:i:4:p:511-534

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