The Effect of Snap Benefits for Food Insecurity

This paper investigates the effect of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for food insecurity. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) temporarily increased SNAP benefits. We use that increase as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of endogenous SNAP benefits. We estimate models of food insecurity with linear two-stage least squares and non-linear instrumental variable (IV) probit. Results suggest that a per person SNAP dollar decreases food insecurity by 0.4% to 0.9%. However, effects are nonlinear. The probability of food insecurity is highest, and marginal effects are largest, when benefit amounts are small