In 2000, 8.8 million children received food stamps, making the Food Stamp Program a crucial component of the social safety net. Despite its importance, little research has examined the effect of food stamps on children's overall well-being. Using the Current Population Survey from 1989 to 2001,...

The Food Stamp Program saw an unprecedented decline in participation from 27.5 million participants in 1994 to 18.2 million participants in 1999. A strong economy and changes in social welfare programs drove this change. An econometric model with State-level data calculated that 35 percent of...

This research seeks to understand the role of information, in the form of media campaigns, and changes in transaction costs, in the form of online applications and call centers, in the growth in county-level SNAP caseloads. We find that SNAP radio advertisements are associated with a small...

In this paper we first study where food purchases are made by SNAP recipients in comparison to eligible and ineligible non-SNAP recipients. Particularly, we analyze whether SNAP recipients use retail food outlets which generally have lower prices and how far they travel to purchase food. We next...

Previous work on the relationship between food insecurity and childhood overweight has lead to a wide array of answers – some have found a positive relationship, others no relationship, and still others a negative relationship. This previous work has shared one thing in common – all have...

The ability of food stamps to ameliorate food insufficiency in the U.S. is estimated with self-selection models which incorporate the systematic differences between eligible food stamp participants and non-participants. The analysis is performed with a sample of eligible households from the 1992...

Replaced with revised version of paper 10/20/10.

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/29/11.