The Changing Food Assistance Landscape: The Food Stamp Program in a Post-Welfare Reform Environment

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) dramatically transformed and continues to transform the food assistance landscape in the United States. The Act cut more funds from the Food Stamp Program than it did from any other program, through reductions in benefits per person and restrictions in eligibility. Despite these cuts, food stamps now have a more prominent role in the post-welfare reform social safety net because the largest cash-assistance entitlement program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was replaced with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, a nonentitlement program. This leaves the Food Stamp Program as one of the only remaining entitlement programs available to almost all low-income households.food stamps, transfer payments, food consumption, nutrition, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty,

Causes and Consequences of the Calorie Crunch

Monthly welfare programs such as the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) produce consistent cycles of expenditure and consumption amongst recipients. Food insecurity and negative behavioral outcomes track these cycles. This paper leverages new data from the USDA, the FoodAPS survey, and to answer a variety of questions related to these phenomena: Are consumption and expenditure cycles correlated? Who bears the burden of food shortages at the end of each benefit month? Does diet quality track food expenditure? I find robust expenditure and consumption cycles in the FoodAPS data, but contrary to popular belief, they are only weakly correlated. The youngest children are spared from cyclical food shortages, but school-aged children experience them when they are out of school. Universal participation of the sample in school meal programs while in school (and the complete lack of participation in summer meal programs) suggests that these programs may mitigate a great deal of children’s food insecurity. Diet quality declines over the course of the month, compounding the impact of fewer meals on health. Food access issues cannot explain the identified cycles. We interpret these findings as evidence consistent with a consumption-driven calorie crunch in which the expenditure cycle is a response to the previous month’s consumption deprivation

Self Control and Intertemporal Choice: Evidence from Glucose and Depletion Interventions

CESifo Working Paper Series No. 4609Recent developments in economic theory model intertemporal choice decisions as problems of restraining one's natural impulse to consume today. We use interventions that have been shown in the psychology literature to affect impulse control to examine whether this is indeed the case for laboratory elicitations of time preference. In other words, is savings behavior affected by manipulations of willpower? Our results are mixed, with one widely used willpower-reducing intervention increasing subjects' savings, and with evidence of a substantial placebo effects with respect to another intervention based on sugared beverage consumption. Since all our treatment effects -which are substantial in magnitude- are driven by increases in the intertemporal substitution elasticity (i.e. greater sensitivity to high prices), we suspect that the primary mechanism behind them is an increase in subjects' attention to the decision, rather than their ability to resist the temptation to get money sooner

Distance and Tangential Velocity of the Main Ionizing Star in the North America/Pelican Nebulae with Gaia EDR3

The Bajamar Star is an early O star that ionizes the North America/Pelican Nebulae. In projection, it is near the geometric center of the H II region, but appears to lie outside any of the main stellar subgroups. Furthermore, in Gaia DR2, there were slight discrepancies between this star and the rest of the system in parallax (2σ larger) and relative tangential velocity (~6 km s⁻¹). Using Gaia EDR3, we find that the parallax discrepancy has disappeared, but the velocity difference remains. These results are consistent with the star having escaped from a subgroup