| Project: Assessing Effects of Food Stamps on Child Outcomes When Program Participation is Misreported |
| Award Year: 2007 |
| Amount of award, fiscal 2007: $140,000.00 |
| Institution: Iowa State University |
| Principal Investigator: Craig Gundersen |
| Status: Completed |
| Detailed Objective: This study investigates problems of identifying Food Stamp Program (FSP) effects on child health and nutrition-related outcomes. It is well known that households do not accurately report Food Stamp Program participation in national surveys. When such reporting errors are not explicitly acknowledged, estimates of parameters linking FSP participation to child health and nutrition outcomes are biased and the true outcome impacts are generally not statistically identified. This study will also examine how changes in the size or composition of the FSP caseload would affect child outcomes. For each of these research questions, various sets of nonparametric and parametric assumptions will be applied to derive "identification regions,"-i.e., the sets of values that are logically consistent with the observed data and imposed assumptions. Graphical analysis will be used to illustrate how the identification regions depend on assumptions about the extent and nature of misreporting participation and assumptions about the size and composition of the FSP caseload. Possible insights from this analysis include the discovery of misreporting thresholds above which it is not possible to statistically identify differences in child nutrition-related outcomes between FSP participants and nonparticipants. Bounds for child health and nutrition impacts of policies aimed at changing the size and composition of the food stamp caseload will also be illustrated.
Individual data on children from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) will be used to examine a large range of child health and nutrition-related outcomes. These outcomes include childhood obesity, food insecurity, food and nutrient intakes, disease incidence, self-reported health status, and miscellaneous other conditions and experiences. |
| Topic: Data Collection and Methodology, Nutrition-Related Health Outcomes, SNAP/Food Stamp Program |
| Dataset: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) |
Output:
Gundersen, C., B. Kreider, and J. Pepper. “The Economics of Food Insecurity in the United States,” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Vol. 33, No. 3, Autumn 2011.
Gundersen, C., B. Kreider, and J. Pepper. “The Impact of the National School Lunch Program on Child Health: A Nonparametric Bounds Analysis,” Journal of Econometrics, Vol. 166, Issue 1, January 2012.
Kreider, B., J. Pepper, C. Gundersen, and D. Joliffe. “Identifying the Effects of SNAP (Food Stamps) on Child Health Outcomes When Participation Is Endogenous and Misreported,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 107, No. 499, September 2012
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