Essays On Food Assistance Program Participation And Demand For Food
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Essays On Food Assistance Program Participation And Demand For Food
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Author : Ariun Ishdorj
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2008
Essays On Food Assistance Program Participation And Demand For Food written by Ariun Ishdorj and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008 with categories.
Three Essays On Food Security Food Demand And Welfare Program Participation
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Author : Suwen Pan
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2002
Three Essays On Food Security Food Demand And Welfare Program Participation written by Suwen Pan and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2002 with categories.
The relationship among food security, food away from home and welfare program participation is examined in the dissertation. Current Population Survey data are used to identify and compare the effects of family structure, income sources, and demographic information on food stamp program participation and food consumption based on different food security status. In addition, Iowa administration data are used to compare the effects of local socioeconomic situation on family investment program participation between rural and non-rural areas. Analysis in the first paper uses a bivariate ordered probit model and the results show that the effects of family structure, income sources and demographic variables are larger for food secure and hungry households than for food secure households. The second paper uses two-stage budgeting and a double hurdle model and shows that food secure households are more likely to eat out and spend more on food away from home than do food insecure households. A sample selection model is used in the third paper and the results of this paper show that program participation status is affected more by the local labor market situation for rural households than for those living in nonrural areas.
Essays On Food Waste And Consumer Demand Analysis
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Author : Yang Yu
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020
Essays On Food Waste And Consumer Demand Analysis written by Yang Yu and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with categories.
Unnecessary food waste is a global economic and environmental problem. In the United States alone, consumer welfare loss from food waste amounts to a massive $160 billion annually, which is about 30% of the total food supply. Moreover, discarded food is a major source of greenhouse gas emission globally, generating about 3.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide and methane each year. If regarded as a country, food waste is the third-largest carbon-emitting country after the U.S. and China. Despite the importance of the food-waste problem, researchers have had only limited success in studying the underlying issues behind food waste, partly because no public or private organization is measuring actual food waste on a wide scale. At best, researchers have been able to investigate food-waste issues either at the national level by comparing separate datasets on food consumption and food acquisition or at the small scale by conducting experiments or surveys. The three essays in this dissertation study attempts to fill this gap by (i) employing an indirect but creative method to examine household-level food waste in a national survey of food acquisition, thus allowing us to investigate how household characteristics are linked to the estimated levels of food waste, (ii) incorporating food waste into a theoretical model of household behavior, thereby showing that waste is a rational outcome of utility maximization and an important factor to account for in other models of household-level food behavior, and (iii) finding empirical evidence in consumer and market data that policy changes (i.e., extending the sell-by date on milk cartons) can and do reduce food waste. To overcome the lack of observed data on food waste, the first essay begins by formulating household food consumption as a production process that transforms food inputs into chemical energy required for the human body's metabolic process and physical activities. Household-level food waste is estimated as input inefficiency via a stochastic frontier production model. Applying the method to a nationally representative sample of households, the essay shows that on average, U.S. households waste about 31% of their food, and that this level of annual waste corresponds to $240 billion. In addition, by accommodating heterogeneous wasting behavior, the results indicate that healthier diets and higher income lead to more household food waste, whereas lower household food security, food-assistance program participation, and larger household sizes are associated with less food waste. The second essay shows that without modeling or at least partially accounting for wasting behavior, demand estimates in traditional models are potentially biased. The reason for the bias is that the omitted food waste is often a rational and heterogeneous choice made by households and linked to other consumer choices. This point is illustrated by both theoretical and empirical examples. Two structural approaches to identifying and estimating rational food waste are introduced. The first approach partially identifies the waste function through economic constraints. The second approach considers behavioral assumptions on household utility maximization. Taken together, these efforts represent one of the first attempts to incorporate food waste into utility-maximizing models of consumer behavior and provide useful estimates to study the rationales of wasting food. Policymakers could apply the models and utilize the results to calibrate the amounts of actual consumption and to find more effective mechanisms to incentivize food waste reduction. The third essay examines a real-world policy change that was intended to reduce food waste. Consumers often find sell-by labels confusing and misinterpret their meanings as "safe-until" dates. Consequently, a significant portion of perishable food is mismanaged and disposed of earlier than necessary. As an effort to reduce food waste, in September 2010, New York City's Board of Health repealed its regulation on sell-by dates of pasteurized milk products. This policy change, in effect, increased the shelf-life of milk from 9 days to about 15 days. Based on a theoretical model of rational food waste and various empirical verifications using micro-level scanner data, the essay finds that the city's new policy effectively reduced food waste by more than 10%. This result translates to a reduction in wasted milk of more than 5.2 million pounds annually in New York City, an approximately $3.4 million value. This study is the first to find empirical evidence that policy changes can reduce food waste.
Essays On Food Insecurity And Food And Nutrition Assistance Policy In The United States
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Author : Sarah Elizabeth Charnes
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2021
Essays On Food Insecurity And Food And Nutrition Assistance Policy In The United States written by Sarah Elizabeth Charnes and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2021 with categories.
This dissertation investigates many facets of means-testing in the United States through the lens of public food assistance. In Chapter 1, I speak to the literature on “administrative burden,” or individual-level barriers to means-tested program participation. Previous studies debate the extent to which administrative barriers inhibit take-up of means-tested programs. I study two application streamlining initiatives intended to simplify the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) application process in the United States through the reduction of transaction and information costs. The two initiatives differ along the dimension of in-person versus mail-based interactions with clients. Using two-way fixed effects and alternative difference-in-difference estimators, I estimate an overall 4.3 percentage point (19.3 percent) average treatment effect of application streamlining on SNAP participation. Further analysis of the two implementation models suggests a stronger effect of in-person interactions with clients (25.8 percent), compared to off-site outreach (15.2 percent). However, different approaches appear to be more effective for different eligible populations: there is suggestive evidence that off-site outreach could have a stronger effect for population subgroups experiencing mobility-related barriers to take-up. As such, this study points to the importance of understanding the behaviors and barriers to take-up experienced by specific target populations when designing initiatives intended to improve enrollment in means-tested programs. In Chapter 2, I speak to current discourse around the association between household food insecurity and disability status. Disability is a known risk factor for food insecurity, even when accounting for household income. However, the mechanisms driving the relationship between disability and food insecurity remain underexplored. Using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey, I test the extent to which food store choice (representing food access) mediates the association between disability and food insecurity in the United States. The analysis is complicated by the notion that food insecurity also influences food store choice. Nevertheless, multivariate regression findings suggest that food access is not a significant driver of high rates of food insecurity among households where disabilities are present. This chapter has been accepted for publication in Physiology & Behavior (Charnes, forthcoming). In Chapter 3, I address questions surrounding the cause of the SNAP benefit cycle – a phenomenon in which SNAP benefits (disbursed on a monthly basis) are typically spent all at once within the first few days of receipt. The disbursement of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits is associated with a decline in food spending and caloric consumption over the SNAP month, resulting in a range of adverse consequences. However, there is a lack of consensus about the underlying cause of the SNAP benefit cycle. Building upon work conducted by Tiehen, Newman, and Kirlin (2017), I use the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey to examine SNAP households’ acquisitions of free food patterns across the SNAP month. I conclude that a steady state of free food acquisitions across the month is primarily attributable to benefit inadequacy. Although the three chapters are situated within distinct sets of literature, they jointly point to the importance of public food assistance for Americans in need. This dissertation was written during the Trump Presidency, which was characterized by movements to drastically cut the social safety net – followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, its associated recession, and movements to rebuild the safety net in the early years of the Biden Presidency. The three essays highlight the conditions that have led to current proposals to transition to a universal structure for SNAP and other safety net programs.
Three Essays On Food Assistance Environmental Stressor And Food Choices
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Author : Jinglin Feng
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2023
Three Essays On Food Assistance Environmental Stressor And Food Choices written by Jinglin Feng and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2023 with categories.
This dissertation consists of three essays on food assistance, environmental stressor, and food choices: (i) The first essay analyzes the distributional impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on diet quality. (ii) The second essay examines heterogeneity in the use of social networks and charitable food assistance over the SNAP benefit month. (iii) Lastly, the third essay focuses on the effect of short-term ambient air pollution on diet quality, using household scanner data. SNAP is the nation's largest domestic food and nutrition assistance program for low-income Americans. Recent studies that examined the effect of SNAP on diet quality focus on the average effects. In essay one, we use the 2012 USDA's National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) data and an unconditional quantile estimator to examine the distributional impacts of SNAP on diet quality, as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2010 (HEI-2010). To identify the differential impacts of SNAP across the distribution of diet quality, we exploit exogenous variation in state's maximum weekly unemployment insurance (UI) benefits and state outreach spending per capita as instrumental variables (IVs). We find that SNAP has no significant impact on households' diet quality on average. However, for households with initially low-to-intermediate diet quality, SNAP participation reduces their HEI scores by over 17% or more than 7 points out of a total score of 100. The negative impacts of SNAP on these HEI quantiles are mainly driven by an increased acquisition of empty calories. As low-income households often combine personal resources with both public and private food assistance in times of need, understanding how they fulfill their energy needs over the SNAP benefit month is crucial. In essay two, we use the 2012 USDA's FoodAPS data to examine the strategies SNAP households use to meet their energy needs throughout the benefit month, focusing on complementary food sources like social networks and charitable food assistance (CFA). We also explore heterogeneity in the use of these food sources. Our study yields three key findings. First, we find a significant spike in calorie acquisition on benefit receipt day (day 0), rather than a SNAP cycle throughout the month. Second, both social networks and CFA play an important role in food acquisition, particularly for households not owning a vehicle, albeit homeownership and income moderate this impact. Third, diet quality does not change over the course of the benefit month. Air pollution, as the largest environmental health risk factor worldwide, has well-documented adverse effects on human health and well-being, yet its impact on consumer food choices and diet quality remains largely unknown. Essay three studies the causal effects of short-term ambient air pollution on diet quality, as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), using wildfire smoke exposure from 2010-2018 as a source of exogenous variation for air pollution. By linking nationwide satellite-based smoke plume data, ground-based pollutant measurements, and consumer scanner data for more than 120,000 U.S. households, we find no impacts of air pollution on overall diet quality or individual diet components. This suggests that air pollution levels might not be a substantial driver of household dietary choices. Our findings reveal a socioeconomic gradient in diet quality, with lower-income households, less-educated household heads, and counties with higher PM2.5 levels consistently exhibiting poorer diet quality. Moreover, we observe no evidence that the effects of air pollution vary across income, education, and county pollution levels.
Three Essays On The U S Food And Nutrition Assistance Programs
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Author : Pourya Valizadeh
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018
Three Essays On The U S Food And Nutrition Assistance Programs written by Pourya Valizadeh and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with categories.
The goal of the federal food and nutrition assistance programs in the U.S. is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low-income households. This dissertation explores the extent to which these programs have accomplished this goal. The first essay examines how the implementation and the subsequent expiration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) affected the material well-being of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants. I find that ARRA implementation on average increased the overall material well-being of SNAP participants, as measured by their total nondurable spending, whereas the ARRA expiration reduced their well-being. Furthermore, using a fixed-effect quantile estimator, I find that ARRA implementation led to a first-order improvement in the distributions of both total nondurable and food spending. I also find that low-food and high-food spending households were the most responsive to increase in benefits. ARRA expiration, however, affected households with the lowest total nondurable and food expenditures. The second essay estimates the welfare effects of the SNAP benefit cycle 0́3 the observation that food spending of SNAP households spikes upon benefits arrival and declines over the remainder of the benefit month. I first show that the price component of food expenditure is also sensitive to the benefit arrival. I then estimate welfare changes due to the changes in prices paid. I find that by the end of the third week of the benefit month, households are paying 22% less on food bundles, implying a change in money-metric welfare of $4.94 per day or 6.6% of the average amount spent on the first two days of the month. The final essay estimates the effects of aging out of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on quality of children's diets and rates of food insecurity. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find a fairly large decrease in overall diet quality of children as they become age-ineligible for WIC. Moreover, by investigating the entire diet quality distribution, I find that children prone to lower- quality diets experience larger decreases in nutrition. I find no significant effect on rates of food insecurity.
Three Essays On Participation In And Effects Of Us Food Assistance Programs
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Author : Yiting Lan (Ph. D. in consumer sciences)
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2021
Three Essays On Participation In And Effects Of Us Food Assistance Programs written by Yiting Lan (Ph. D. in consumer sciences) and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2021 with Food relief categories.
Over the last decade, many American families did not have enough food to meet their needs. In the most recent Household Food Security Report by the USDA ERS, about 10.5% of households in the U.S., 13.7 million households, experienced food insecurity at some time in 2019. Among those food-insecure households, about 58% were enrolled in at least one of the three largest federal nutrition assistance programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly named food stamps); the Special Supplemental Nutrition, Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); and the National School Lunch Program. These federal nutrition assistance programs play important roles in improving access to adequate and healthy food. In this dissertation, I study specific aspects of the SNAP and WIC programs. In the first chapter, I briefly introduce this dissertation's objectives, summarize the methods and data I use to achieve these objectives, and highlight key results. The second through fourth chapters provide the additional details and focus on either SNAP or WIC. In the second chapter, I expand on previous work by examining the impact of a SNAP benefits change on food consumption. Previous research provides evidence that SNAP benefits' rise has a positive impact on food-at-home and some non-food expenditures. However, the impact of the change in SNAP benefits on expenditures on specific food categories has yet to be examined. I use a national level expenditure survey with a difference-in-difference method to examine the effect of SNAP benefits increase and decrease on food expenditure. The results provide evidence that SNAP benefits rise in 2009 caused SNAP recipients to increase expenditure on food-at-home, fruits, vegetables, non-alcohol beverage, and dairy. The cut of benefits in 2013 caused SNAP recipients to decrease the expenditures on sweets. The third chapter provides details on WIC enrolment and redemption rates in Ohio. The Ohio Department of Health provided data for this chapter. The study is an exploratory analysis of enrollment and redemption of WIC in Ohio at the county level. I find a decreasing trend of both WIC enrollment and redemption rate in Ohio from 2016 to 2018 and use a county-level fixed effects model to show the negative relationship between WIC enrollment rate over time, WIC redemption rate over time. The fourth chapter continues with the impact of WIC. The study uses the same administrative data as Chapter 3 and investigates the impact of time length that children stay in WIC on their health outcomes: number of risk conditions and BMI percentile, with an individual fixed-effects model. The study expands the previous research by using time as a source of exogenous variation, using administrative clinic data instead of survey data to prove WIC's positive impact on children's health assessments. This work adds to the overall understanding of two federal nutrition assistance programs: SNAP and WIC. This dissertation's results document the effect of SNAP on food expenditure, the impact of WIC on health outcomes, and the enrollment and redemption in Ohio. On the one hand, the positive impact of nutrition assistance programs is documented. On the other hand, the decreasing trend of WIC enrollment and redemption is a serious problem to consider.
Three Essays On Food Security Food Assistance And Migration
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Author : Paul A. Lewin
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2011
Three Essays On Food Security Food Assistance And Migration written by Paul A. Lewin and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with categories.
This dissertation's three essays explore the determinants of food insecurity for rural farm households, the influence of rainfall variability and long-run changes in rainfall levels on the migration decisions of working-age household heads, and the distributional impacts in core and periphery regions of food assistance to households in the hinterland. The first essay examines how socio-economic characteristics of households, local conditions, and public programs are associated with the probability that a farm household in rural Malawi is food insecure. The statistical analysis uses nationally representative data for 7,965 randomly-selected households interviewed during 2004/05 for the second Malawi Integrated Household Survey (IHS-2). Regressions are estimated separately for households in the north, center, and south of Malawi to account for spatial heterogeneity. Results of a Probit regression model reveal that households are less likely to be food insecure if they have more cultivated land per capita, receive agricultural field assistance, reside in a community with an irrigation scheme, and are headed by an individual with a high school degree. Factors that positively correlate with a household's food insecurity are number of household members and distance to markets. The second essay uses nationally representative data from Malawi's 2004/05 Integrated Household Survey (IHS-2) to examine whether rainfall conditions influence a rural worker's decision to make a long-term move to an urban or another rural area. Results of a Full Information Maximum Likelihood regression model reveal that (1) rainfall shocks constrain migration, most likely by making it difficult for prospective migrants to cover costs of migration, (2) migrants choose to move to communities where rainfall variability is lower, and (3) rainfall shocks have larger negative effects on the earnings of recent migrants than on long-time residents' earnings. The third essay examines how benefits from food assistance programs to needy households spillover between areas and among household income groups in the United States. We study the effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the Portland Oregon metro Core and its Periphery trade area, using a Multiregional Input- Output (MRIO) model based on a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM). The analysis captures direct, indirect and induced effects of SNAP on each region and spillover effects on the other region. SNAP benefits to the lower income household classes in each region are traced to their effects on the local economy in each region, and to the effects on household income by income class. The analysis finds that (1) the economic impact on the Portland Core from a given level of SNAP benefits to households in the Periphery is greater than the economic impact in the Periphery from the same level of SNAP benefits to households in the Core; (2) high-income households benefit more than low-income households from the indirect and induced economic impact of SNAP.
Three Essays On The Economics Of Nutrition Assistance And Food Security
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Author : Xia Si
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018
Three Essays On The Economics Of Nutrition Assistance And Food Security written by Xia Si and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with Econometrics categories.
This dissertation focuses on the economics of nutrition assistance and food security. The first essay tests the substitution effect between public and private nutrition assistance programs in the United States. It is the first to address the causal relationship between shocks in the availability of public nutrition assistance and low-income households’ private nutrition assistance utilization. In particular, we examined the way in which loss of WIC benefits when children aged-out of WIC eligibility impacted a household’s utilization of private food assistance. Using a regression discontinuity analysis framework, I found that households significantly increased utilization of private nutrition assistance following a negative shock in the availability of public nutrition assistance. Estimates indicated that some households might have been able to compensate 50 – 80 percent of their loss in public WIC nutrition assistance by increasing the frequency of utilization of private nutrition assistance. The second essay exploited the expansion of Community Distribution Partners (CDPs) of Crossroads Community Service (CCS) to investigate if the reduction of travel costs improved low-income households’ utilization of private nutrition assistance. I found that after a new CDP within 2 km from a client’s address was opened, potentially shortening client’s traveling distance, nearby clients’ visiting frequency increased by 4.4% compared to clients living farther from this CDP site. The third essay investigated the impact of E-verify mandates, which make it more difficult for certain undocumented workers to find a new job, on the food security status of both citizens and non-citizens. Using a Difference in Difference approach and data from CPS’s food security supplements, this study found that even through E-verify mandates had no significant effects on family income, they had unintended consequences on households’ food security. E-verify mandates reduced the food security of both U.S citizens and non-citizens residing in the U.S. The effect was consistent over different sub-types of food security measures.
Background Papers
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Author : United States. President's Commission on Income Maintenance Programs
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1970
Background Papers written by United States. President's Commission on Income Maintenance Programs and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1970 with Basic income categories.