Panel:
Food Expenditures, Food Insecurity, and U.S. Social Safety Net Programs after the Great Recession
(Poverty and Income Policy)
Thursday, November 2, 2017: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Dusable (Hyatt Regency Chicago)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Panel Organizers: Matthew P. Rabbitt, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Panel Chairs: Craig Gundersen, University of Illinois
Discussants: Craig Gundersen, University of Illinois and Charles Courtemanche, Georgia State University
This panel examines how U.S. programs and policies affect the food needs of U.S. households. Food and nutrition assistance programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program), are designed to address the food needs of households by providing resources necessary to purchase healthy and nutritious food. Additionally, other non-food programs and policies may facilitate greater expenditure towards food, nutrition and other household needs. In this panel, the papers examine two common, and recently utilized, policy approaches that help to address economic-wellbeing and U.S. food needs: fiscal policy and SNAP. The first paper examines the effect of the 2011 federal payroll tax cut on food insecurity and utilizes a quasi-natural experiment for identification. The second paper focuses on the relationship between SNAP receipt and the labor market. The final two papers utilize exogenous variation in SNAP benefit allotments, following the sunset of the SNAP benefit increase under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), to examine its effect on food and non-food expenditures.
