| Project: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Household Spending: A Flexible Demand System Approach |
| Award Year: 2011 |
| Amount of award, fiscal 2011: $105,000.00 |
| Institution: Abt Associates |
| Status: Ongoing |
| Detailed Objective: This project estimates the impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the Food Stamp Program), geographic location, seasonality, economic conditions, and demographic characteristics on household spending for food and nonfood items using a flexible demand system approach within a two-stage budgeting framework. The first and second stages are modeled using the Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) demand system recently proposed by Lewbel and Pendakur (2009). The Consumer Expenditure Survey (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics) will be used to construct household expenditures, and monthly regional Consumer Price Indexes (Bureau of Labor Statistics) will be used to construct household-specific price indices following Hodelein and Mihaleva (2008). State variation in SNAP rules, wages, income, and income squared will be used as instruments to account for potential selection bias of SNAP participation and allow for causal inference of SNAP on demand for food and nonfood items. |
| Topic: Food Prices and Demand, SNAP/Food Stamp Program |
| Dataset: Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) |