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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. |
