Bounding the effects of food insecurity on children’s health outcomes

Craig Gundersen and Brent Kreider ()

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Previous research has estimated that food insecure children are more likely to suffer from a wide array of negative health outcomes than food secure children, leading many to claim that alleviating food insecurity would lead to better health outcomes. Identifying the causal impacts is problematic, however, given endogenous selection into food security status and potential mismeasurement of true food security status. Using recently developed nonparametric bounding methods and data from the 2001-2006 National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES), we assess what can be identified about the effects of food insecurity on child health outcomes in the presence of nonrandom selection and nonclassical measurement error. Under relatively weak monotonicity assumptions, we can identify that food security has a statistically significant positive impact on good general health and being a healthy weight. Our work suggests that previous research has more likely underestimated than overestimated the causal impacts of food insecurity on health.

Date: 2009-09-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... 85ad1c14553e/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: Bounding the effects of food insecurity on children's health outcomes (2009)
Working Paper: Bounding the Effects of Food Insecurity on Children's Health Outcomes (2008)
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:isu:genstf:200909010700001639

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().