THE FOOD STAMP BENEFIT FORMULA: IMPLICATIONS FOR EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON FOOD DEMAND

To understand how food stamps affect food spending, nonexperimental research typically requires some source of independent variation in food stamp benefits. Three promising sources are examined: (a) variation in household size, (b) variation in deductions from gross income, and (c) receipt of minimum or maximum food stamp benefits. Based on results of a linear regression model with nationally representative data, 90% of the total variation in food stamp benefits is explained by gross cash income, and household size variables alone. This finding raises concern about popular regression approaches to studying the Food Stamp Program.Demand and Price Analysis,

UNDERSTANDING THE FOOD STAMP BENEFIT FORMULA: A TOOL FOR MEASURING THE COMPONENT EFFECTS

This report develops an accounting tool for measuring how the average benefit amount in the U.S. Food Stamp Program is affected by each major component of the rules that determine the benefit level. This tool is used to compare the benefits received by different subpopulations, distinguished by poverty level, demographic makeup, household size, and region of the country. This simple decomposition complements more complex tools, such as microsimulation methods, which help policy analysts understand and evaluate the effects of detailed Food Stamp Program regulations.Food Stamp Program, benefit formula, income, household size, poverty status, deductions, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty,

SQewing social welfare law: The SQE and the future of social welfare law

What’s the point of diversifying the legal sector, if it means fewer people can get jobs and fewer clients can get legal advice? The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) introduced the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) in 2021 to create a new route to qualifying as a solicitor in England & Wales . The SQE was a way to standardise the qualification routes for solicitors, and deal with several barriers to entry, including cost and the difficulty of getting training contracts. I argue that, whilst a more diverse legal sector is of course an important objective, the SQE will damage the social welfare sector, the potential solicitors who want to work in it, and the clients who need it. Whilst we may see a healthier mix of people qualifying, we will see the breadth of work being undertaken, and the number of people helped, shrink. The SQE means that time spent undertaking pro bono work in student advice clinics, law centres or advice agencies can count towards candidates’ 2-year period of qualifying work experience. This has the potential to bolster the pro bono and CLE sectors, and possibly help further develop the pipeline from law school into social welfare law. However, there are several potential drawback. Firstly, these students will require supervision from a sector that is already stretched to capacity. Solicitors with full caseloads of chargeable work will not be able to supervise effectively the candidates undertaking the qualifying work experience. As a result, the demand will not be able to meet the supply and an enormous opportunity to bolster the social welfare advice sector, in so doing strengthening the pipeline, may be lost. SQE1 is a multiple choice exam. This could have a stifling effect on the ability of academics to do anything other than “teach to the test”. The message that the SQE sends to students is that social welfare law is not valuable nor valued. That it is not a viable career option, and that students should be steered away from it to careers in commercial practices. So what is the role of the law school? Is it to prepare students for life in commercial practice? Is it to ensure the legal sector meets the needs of the society at large? Or is it to provide a space for students to learn, experiment, question, reflect and challenge

More Than Just Food: The Diverse Effects of Food Assistance Programs

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, I18, I38, Q18,

THE DISTINCT IMPACT OF FOOD STAMPS ON FOOD SPENDING

The Southworth hypothesis predicts that inframarginal food stamp recipients should choose the same bundle of goods, whether they receive coupons or cash. Empirical research has contradicted this prediction. Here, we present a model that retains some attractive features of the Southworth hypothesis, while relaxing the key assumption that appears to be incorrect. In particular, we allow different forms of benefits to have distinct effects on desired, or unrestricted food spending. Two categories of previously commonly used empirical models are evaluated as special cases of our more general model. We estimate this model using data from two cash-out experiments.Consumer/Household Economics, Food Security and Poverty,

Energy-constrained two-way assisted private and quantum capacities of quantum channels

With the rapid growth of quantum technologies, knowing the fundamental characteristics of quantum systems and protocols is essential for their effective implementation. A particular communication setting that has received increased focus is related to quantum key distribution and distributed quantum computation. In this setting, a quantum channel connects a sender to a receiver, and their goal is to distill either a secret key or entanglement, along with the help of arbitrary local operations and classical communication (LOCC). In this work, we establish a general theory of energy-constrained, LOCC-assisted private and quantum capacities of quantum channels, which are the maximum rates at which an LOCC-assisted quantum channel can reliably establish secret key or entanglement, respectively, subject to an energy constraint on the channel input states. We prove that the energy-constrained squashed entanglement of a channel is an upper bound on these capacities. We also explicitly prove that a thermal state maximizes a relaxation of the squashed entanglement of all phase-insensitive, single-mode input bosonic Gaussian channels, generalizing results from prior work. After doing so, we prove that a variation of the method introduced in [Goodenough et al., New J. Phys. 18, 063005 (2016)] leads to improved upper bounds on the energy-constrained secret-key-agreement capacity of a bosonic thermal channel. We then consider a multipartite setting and prove that two known multipartite generalizations of the squashed entanglement are in fact equal. We finally show that the energy-constrained, multipartite squashed entanglement plays a role in bounding the energy-constrained LOCC-assisted private and quantum capacity regions of quantum broadcast channels.Comment: 31 pages, 6 figure

THE EFFECT ON DIETARY QUALITY OF PARTICIPATION IN THE FOOD STAMP AND WIC PROGRAMS

Participants in the Food Stamp Program consume more meats, added sugars, and total fats than they would in the absence of the program, while their consumption of fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy products stays about the same. Participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) consume significantly less added sugars, which may reflect the substitution of WIC-supplied juices and cereals in place of higher sugar soft drinks and cereals. These findings come from a study of low-income Americans using the Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals.Nutrition assistance programs, food intake, dietary quality, Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals (CSFII), Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty,

Alien Registration- Wilde, Leonard E. (Monticello, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/34287/thumbnail.jp