Does SNAP Improve Your Health?

Christian Gregory and Partha Deb

No 171236, 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: In this study, we examine the effect of SNAP on health quite generally, examining self-assessed health (SAH), healthy time, and basic health utilization measures as outcomes. Our approach is to model outcomes and participation simultaneously, using exogenous variation in state eligibility to identify SNAP participation. We use this approach for both ordered choices (health) and count outcomes (sickdays, office-based visits, outpatient visits), where the former uses maximum likelihood and the latter maximum simulated likelihood. In addition, we control for state-level unobservables that are correlated with both participation and health, which previous studies of this question have neglected. Our results indicate that SNAP has an consistently positive effect on SAH; it significantly increases the probability of reporting excellent or very good health. We also find that SNAP participants spend between 1 and 2 fewer days in bed due to illness each year, and report between 1 and 2 fewer office-based doctor visits and a fraction fewer outpatient visits. Supplementary specifications indicate that, although SNAP participants consume fewer office visits overall, they have more checkups than comparable non-participants.

Keywords: Health Economics and Policy; Research Methods/Statistical Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28
Date: 2014-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/171236/files/gregory_deb_snap_health.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does SNAP improve your health? (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:ags:aaea14:171236

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.171236

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().