Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Food assistance is a large share of the overall food economy and pays for a substantial share of food purchases for individuals. For example, Wilde (2013) finds during the Great Recession, 10-15 percent of food at home was paid for by the SNAP program. In this paper, we explore how food assistance programs have shaped the retail environment. To address this, we ask the following (linked) research questions. First, did roll-out of Food Stamps and WIC affect the retail environment at the time and are those effects persistent today? We will build on work by Hoynes, Schanzenbach, and Almond in a series of papers showing that the idiosyncratic roll-out of the Food Stamp Program across counties affected food purchases. We will also rely on work showing that the roll-out of the WIC program across counties led to an increase in birth weight (Hoynes, Page, and Stevens, 2011) to infer that the WIC program increased purchases of WIC foods. We expect to find that locations with earlier Food Stamps or WIC programs will have more food stores and more workers in those stores, and that these effects may persist to today. Second, did the large increase, and subsequent decrease in the size of the SNAP program driven by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act affect the retail food environment? Did increases and decreases have symmetric effects? We anticipate that the ARRA increase should have led to more sales, with the decline leading to some decline. We will combine data from the Census bureau on the number of establishments and workers in specific industries, from County Business Patterns and the Decennial Censuses. For the more recent analysis we will also consider effects of the ARRA increase and subsequent cut on sales and retailer participation data.