The Real Effect of SNAP Benefits for Food Insecurity

This research investigates the effect of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp program) for food insecurity. SNAP provides benefits to qualifying households for purchasing food. Some have suggested that SNAP benefits may be less effective in some areas because of geographic differences in food prices (Leibtag, 2007; Nord and Hopwood, 2007). We include food prices in our analysis to control for price differences. We find that holding food prices constant, an additional SNAP dollar per-capita reduces the probability of food insecurity by about 0.5 percent. However, we find that marginal effects vary with the level of benefit received and that marginal effects are largest at low benefit levels. Furthermore, we find that even though household incomes are higher when benefits are low, the probability of food insecurity is larger than when benefits are higher. Higher food prices decrease the purchasing power of SNAP benefits, reducing food security.