Download or read book Three Essays on the U S Food and Nutrition Assistance Programs written by Pourya Valizadeh and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of the federal food and nutrition assistance programs in the U.S. is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low-income households. This dissertation explores the extent to which these programs have accomplished this goal. The first essay examines how the implementation and the subsequent expiration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) affected the material well-being of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants. I find that ARRA implementation on average increased the overall material well-being of SNAP participants, as measured by their total nondurable spending, whereas the ARRA expiration reduced their well-being. Furthermore, using a fixed-effect quantile estimator, I find that ARRA implementation led to a first-order improvement in the distributions of both total nondurable and food spending. I also find that low-food and high-food spending households were the most responsive to increase in benefits. ARRA expiration, however, affected households with the lowest total nondurable and food expenditures. The second essay estimates the welfare effects of the SNAP benefit cycle 0́3 the observation that food spending of SNAP households spikes upon benefits arrival and declines over the remainder of the benefit month. I first show that the price component of food expenditure is also sensitive to the benefit arrival. I then estimate welfare changes due to the changes in prices paid. I find that by the end of the third week of the benefit month, households are paying 22% less on food bundles, implying a change in money-metric welfare of $4.94 per day or 6.6% of the average amount spent on the first two days of the month. The final essay estimates the effects of aging out of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on quality of children's diets and rates of food insecurity. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find a fairly large decrease in overall diet quality of children as they become age-ineligible for WIC. Moreover, by investigating the entire diet quality distribution, I find that children prone to lower- quality diets experience larger decreases in nutrition. I find no significant effect on rates of food insecurity.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of United States Food Assistance Programs on Individual Behavior written by Gabrielle Alexandra Ferro and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays that look at the impact of food assistance programs on individuals behavior. The United States government offers a variety of welfare programs meant to provide assistance to families and individuals. This dissertation focuses on two specific food assistance programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and National School Lunch Program (NSLP). While the NSLP is not traditionally thought of as a welfare program, it provides subsidized meals for all school children, regardless of income, and further subsidizes meals for children from low-income households. The first essay uses primary data to determine if pre-ordering and nudging affect childrens selection behavior in the lunchroom. Research on food assistance programs and nutrition is particularly important given recent legislation changes and increases in adolescent obesity. The second essay analyzes the impact of students a la carte choices in the lunchroom on their selection of fruit, vegetables, and low fat dairy. The third essay studies the impact that state policies have on an individuals decision to migrate to another state.

Download or read book Three Essays on Participation in and Effects of US Food Assistance Programs written by Yiting Lan (Ph. D. in consumer sciences) and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, many American families did not have enough food to meet their needs. In the most recent Household Food Security Report by the USDA ERS, about 10.5% of households in the U.S., 13.7 million households, experienced food insecurity at some time in 2019. Among those food-insecure households, about 58% were enrolled in at least one of the three largest federal nutrition assistance programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly named food stamps); the Special Supplemental Nutrition, Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); and the National School Lunch Program. These federal nutrition assistance programs play important roles in improving access to adequate and healthy food. In this dissertation, I study specific aspects of the SNAP and WIC programs. In the first chapter, I briefly introduce this dissertation's objectives, summarize the methods and data I use to achieve these objectives, and highlight key results. The second through fourth chapters provide the additional details and focus on either SNAP or WIC. In the second chapter, I expand on previous work by examining the impact of a SNAP benefits change on food consumption. Previous research provides evidence that SNAP benefits' rise has a positive impact on food-at-home and some non-food expenditures. However, the impact of the change in SNAP benefits on expenditures on specific food categories has yet to be examined. I use a national level expenditure survey with a difference-in-difference method to examine the effect of SNAP benefits increase and decrease on food expenditure. The results provide evidence that SNAP benefits rise in 2009 caused SNAP recipients to increase expenditure on food-at-home, fruits, vegetables, non-alcohol beverage, and dairy. The cut of benefits in 2013 caused SNAP recipients to decrease the expenditures on sweets. The third chapter provides details on WIC enrolment and redemption rates in Ohio. The Ohio Department of Health provided data for this chapter. The study is an exploratory analysis of enrollment and redemption of WIC in Ohio at the county level. I find a decreasing trend of both WIC enrollment and redemption rate in Ohio from 2016 to 2018 and use a county-level fixed effects model to show the negative relationship between WIC enrollment rate over time, WIC redemption rate over time. The fourth chapter continues with the impact of WIC. The study uses the same administrative data as Chapter 3 and investigates the impact of time length that children stay in WIC on their health outcomes: number of risk conditions and BMI percentile, with an individual fixed-effects model. The study expands the previous research by using time as a source of exogenous variation, using administrative clinic data instead of survey data to prove WIC's positive impact on children's health assessments. This work adds to the overall understanding of two federal nutrition assistance programs: SNAP and WIC. This dissertation's results document the effect of SNAP on food expenditure, the impact of WIC on health outcomes, and the enrollment and redemption in Ohio. On the one hand, the positive impact of nutrition assistance programs is documented. On the other hand, the decreasing trend of WIC enrollment and redemption is a serious problem to consider.

Download or read book Three Essays on Food Assistance Environmental Stressor and Food Choices written by Jinglin Feng and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on food assistance, environmental stressor, and food choices: (i) The first essay analyzes the distributional impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on diet quality. (ii) The second essay examines heterogeneity in the use of social networks and charitable food assistance over the SNAP benefit month. (iii) Lastly, the third essay focuses on the effect of short-term ambient air pollution on diet quality, using household scanner data. SNAP is the nation's largest domestic food and nutrition assistance program for low-income Americans. Recent studies that examined the effect of SNAP on diet quality focus on the average effects. In essay one, we use the 2012 USDA's National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) data and an unconditional quantile estimator to examine the distributional impacts of SNAP on diet quality, as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2010 (HEI-2010). To identify the differential impacts of SNAP across the distribution of diet quality, we exploit exogenous variation in state's maximum weekly unemployment insurance (UI) benefits and state outreach spending per capita as instrumental variables (IVs). We find that SNAP has no significant impact on households' diet quality on average. However, for households with initially low-to-intermediate diet quality, SNAP participation reduces their HEI scores by over 17% or more than 7 points out of a total score of 100. The negative impacts of SNAP on these HEI quantiles are mainly driven by an increased acquisition of empty calories. As low-income households often combine personal resources with both public and private food assistance in times of need, understanding how they fulfill their energy needs over the SNAP benefit month is crucial. In essay two, we use the 2012 USDA's FoodAPS data to examine the strategies SNAP households use to meet their energy needs throughout the benefit month, focusing on complementary food sources like social networks and charitable food assistance (CFA). We also explore heterogeneity in the use of these food sources. Our study yields three key findings. First, we find a significant spike in calorie acquisition on benefit receipt day (day 0), rather than a SNAP cycle throughout the month. Second, both social networks and CFA play an important role in food acquisition, particularly for households not owning a vehicle, albeit homeownership and income moderate this impact. Third, diet quality does not change over the course of the benefit month. Air pollution, as the largest environmental health risk factor worldwide, has well-documented adverse effects on human health and well-being, yet its impact on consumer food choices and diet quality remains largely unknown. Essay three studies the causal effects of short-term ambient air pollution on diet quality, as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), using wildfire smoke exposure from 2010-2018 as a source of exogenous variation for air pollution. By linking nationwide satellite-based smoke plume data, ground-based pollutant measurements, and consumer scanner data for more than 120,000 U.S. households, we find no impacts of air pollution on overall diet quality or individual diet components. This suggests that air pollution levels might not be a substantial driver of household dietary choices. Our findings reveal a socioeconomic gradient in diet quality, with lower-income households, less-educated household heads, and counties with higher PM2.5 levels consistently exhibiting poorer diet quality. Moreover, we observe no evidence that the effects of air pollution vary across income, education, and county pollution levels.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Nutrition Assistance and Food Security written by Xia Si and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on the economics of nutrition assistance and food security. The first essay tests the substitution effect between public and private nutrition assistance programs in the United States. It is the first to address the causal relationship between shocks in the availability of public nutrition assistance and low-income households’ private nutrition assistance utilization. In particular, we examined the way in which loss of WIC benefits when children aged-out of WIC eligibility impacted a household’s utilization of private food assistance. Using a regression discontinuity analysis framework, I found that households significantly increased utilization of private nutrition assistance following a negative shock in the availability of public nutrition assistance. Estimates indicated that some households might have been able to compensate 50 – 80 percent of their loss in public WIC nutrition assistance by increasing the frequency of utilization of private nutrition assistance. The second essay exploited the expansion of Community Distribution Partners (CDPs) of Crossroads Community Service (CCS) to investigate if the reduction of travel costs improved low-income households’ utilization of private nutrition assistance. I found that after a new CDP within 2 km from a client’s address was opened, potentially shortening client’s traveling distance, nearby clients’ visiting frequency increased by 4.4% compared to clients living farther from this CDP site. The third essay investigated the impact of E-verify mandates, which make it more difficult for certain undocumented workers to find a new job, on the food security status of both citizens and non-citizens. Using a Difference in Difference approach and data from CPS’s food security supplements, this study found that even through E-verify mandates had no significant effects on family income, they had unintended consequences on households’ food security. E-verify mandates reduced the food security of both U.S citizens and non-citizens residing in the U.S. The effect was consistent over different sub-types of food security measures.

Download or read book Essays on Food Insecurity and Food and Nutrition Assistance Policy in the United States written by Sarah Elizabeth Charnes and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates many facets of means-testing in the United States through the lens of public food assistance. In Chapter 1, I speak to the literature on “administrative burden,” or individual-level barriers to means-tested program participation. Previous studies debate the extent to which administrative barriers inhibit take-up of means-tested programs. I study two application streamlining initiatives intended to simplify the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) application process in the United States through the reduction of transaction and information costs. The two initiatives differ along the dimension of in-person versus mail-based interactions with clients. Using two-way fixed effects and alternative difference-in-difference estimators, I estimate an overall 4.3 percentage point (19.3 percent) average treatment effect of application streamlining on SNAP participation. Further analysis of the two implementation models suggests a stronger effect of in-person interactions with clients (25.8 percent), compared to off-site outreach (15.2 percent). However, different approaches appear to be more effective for different eligible populations: there is suggestive evidence that off-site outreach could have a stronger effect for population subgroups experiencing mobility-related barriers to take-up. As such, this study points to the importance of understanding the behaviors and barriers to take-up experienced by specific target populations when designing initiatives intended to improve enrollment in means-tested programs. In Chapter 2, I speak to current discourse around the association between household food insecurity and disability status. Disability is a known risk factor for food insecurity, even when accounting for household income. However, the mechanisms driving the relationship between disability and food insecurity remain underexplored. Using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey, I test the extent to which food store choice (representing food access) mediates the association between disability and food insecurity in the United States. The analysis is complicated by the notion that food insecurity also influences food store choice. Nevertheless, multivariate regression findings suggest that food access is not a significant driver of high rates of food insecurity among households where disabilities are present. This chapter has been accepted for publication in Physiology & Behavior (Charnes, forthcoming). In Chapter 3, I address questions surrounding the cause of the SNAP benefit cycle – a phenomenon in which SNAP benefits (disbursed on a monthly basis) are typically spent all at once within the first few days of receipt. The disbursement of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits is associated with a decline in food spending and caloric consumption over the SNAP month, resulting in a range of adverse consequences. However, there is a lack of consensus about the underlying cause of the SNAP benefit cycle. Building upon work conducted by Tiehen, Newman, and Kirlin (2017), I use the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey to examine SNAP households’ acquisitions of free food patterns across the SNAP month. I conclude that a steady state of free food acquisitions across the month is primarily attributable to benefit inadequacy. Although the three chapters are situated within distinct sets of literature, they jointly point to the importance of public food assistance for Americans in need. This dissertation was written during the Trump Presidency, which was characterized by movements to drastically cut the social safety net – followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, its associated recession, and movements to rebuild the safety net in the early years of the Biden Presidency. The three essays highlight the conditions that have led to current proposals to transition to a universal structure for SNAP and other safety net programs.

Download or read book U S Domestic Food Assistance Programs written by J. William Levedahl and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Informing Food and Nutrition Assistance Policy written by Priscilla Smith and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About 1 in 5 Americans participates in at least one of USDA¿s food and nutrition assistance programs. Sound research is needed to ensure that the programs operate effectively and efficiently. Since 1998, Congress has provided funds to the USDA¿s Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Program (FANRP) to study and evaluate the Nation¿s domestic food and nutrition assistance programs. FANRP has become the premier source of food and nutrition assistance research in the U.S., sponsoring over 600 publications on a wide range of topics related to food and nutrition assistance. This report, prepared at the 10-year anniversary of the FANRP program, highlights some of the key research conducted during the program¿s first decade.

Download or read book Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Program written by Food Assistance & Nutrition Research (Program : U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book SDGs in the Americas and Caribbean Region written by Walter Leal Filho and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 1692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​This volume provides an overview of the ways sustainable development issues as a whole, and the SDGs in particular, are perceived and practiced in a variety of countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region. It also discusses the extent to which its many socio-economic problems hinder progresses towards the pursuit of a sustainable future, and documents successful experiences from across the region. This book is part of the "100 papers to accelerate the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals initiative".

Download or read book Three Essays on Food Insecurity and Child Welfare written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three essays on food insecurity and child welfare.

Download or read book Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications written by United States. Superintendent of Documents and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Catalog written by Food and Nutrition Information Center (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 1626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Snap written by Congressional Research Service and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called the Food Stamp Program, is designed primarily to increase the food purchasing power of eligible low-income households to help them buy a nutritionally adequate low-cost diet. This report describes the rules related to eligibility for SNAP benefits as well as the rules for benefits and their redemption. SNAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service (USDA-FNS). SNAP is authorized by the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008. This law, formerly the Food Stamp Act of 1977, has since 1973 been reauthorized by the “farm bill,” omnibus legislation that also typically includes the authorization of other federal agricultural policies and programs. The program was most recently reauthorized by the 2014 farm bill (P.L. 113-79, enacted February 7, 2014). SNAP eligibility and benefits are calculated on a household basis. Eligibility is determined through a traditional or a categorical eligibility path. Under traditional eligibility, applicant households must meet gross income, net income, and asset tests. Specifically, household gross monthly income (all income as defined by SNAP law) must be at or below 130% of the federal poverty level, and household net (SNAP-specified deductions are subtracted) monthly income must be at 100% of the federal poverty level. The traditional asset rules are set at $2,000 per household (inflation adjusted). (Households that contain an elderly or disabled member have a higher asset limit and also do not have to meet the gross income test.) Under categorical eligibility, SNAP eligibility is automatically conveyed based upon the applicant's participation in other means-tested programs, namely Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), or General Assistance (GA). Because TANF is a broad-purpose block grant, the state option to extend SNAP eligibility to applicants that receive a TANF-funded benefit allows states to offer program eligibility under rules that vary from those discussed in this paragraph, including an elimination of the asset test. If eligible for SNAP, an applicant household also undergoes a calculation of its monthly benefit amount (or allotment). This calculation utilizes the household's net income as well as the maximum allotment, a figure that equals the current value of the “Thrifty Food Plan” (TFP). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act temporarily increased this value; this increase ended after October 31, 2013. Benefits are issued on an EBT card, which operates with a declining balance like a debit card. Benefits are not cash, may not be accessed at an automatic teller machine, and are redeemable only for foods. Benefits may be redeemed for foods at licensed retailers, which may include a wide variety of retailers so long as retailers meet licensing requirements. This report focuses on SNAP eligibility and the form and function of benefits. For an overview of SNAP along with the other USDA-FNS programs, such as the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), and National School Lunch Program (NSLP), see CRS Report R42353, Domestic Food Assistance: Summary of Programs. For issues related to SNAP and the new farm bill, see CRS Report R43332, SNAP and Related Nutrition Provisions of the 2014 Farm Bill (P.L. 113-79)

Download or read book Monthly Catalogue United States Public Documents written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Future Survey Annual 1983 written by Michael Marien and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: