The Health Consequences of Senior Hunger in the United States: Evidence from the 1999-2010 NHANES

Millions of seniors are food insecure in the United States, meaning that scores do not have access to enough food at all times for an active, healthy life. What makes food insecurity an even more pressing issue is its association with a wide array of negative nutrition and health consequences. In earlier reports on food insecurity among seniors it was documented that food insecure seniors, even after controlling for other factors, were at higher risk of experiencing negative nutrition and health consequences than food secure seniors. In this report, we build on those earlier findings in three main directions. Namely, we add in several new health outcomes; we use four more years of data ; and we examine how trends in health and nutrition outcomes among food secure and food insecure seniors have changed over the past decade. Using data from the 1999-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), we considered the following outcomes related to nutrient intakes: energy intake, protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin B6, calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, and iron. The set of health outcomes we analyzed were diabetes, general health , depression, diabetes, ADL limitations, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, congestive heart failure, coronary heart disease, cancer, reports of chest pain, gum disease, psoriasis, asthma, having had a heart attack, and a self-report of gum health

Do Welfare Asset Limits Affect Household Saving? Evidence from Welfare Reform

In this paper, we use household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of new saving incentives that were implemented as part of the overhaul of U.S. welfare policy during the mid-1990s on the saving of households at risk of entering welfare. The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program devolved responsibility of program rules to the states, and many states have responded by relaxing liquid asset and vehicle-equity limits that determine program eligibility, and by introducing time limits on benefit receipt. According to the recent theoretical work and statements made by public officials, such policies are predicted to increase total savings for those households who have a large ex-ante probability of welfare receipt such as female-headed households with children. We follow a sample of female heads with children from 1994 to 2001 and find that in both absolute terms, and relative to comparison groups of male heads and female heads without children, there has been no impact of welfare policy changes on the saving of at-risk households.

Relative Prices and Substitution Across Wage, Welfare, and Disability Income

In this paper I exploit the fact that the social and economic reforms over the past two decades differentially affected the opportunity costs of non-participation in work, welfare, and disability programs for single mothers across different birth-year and education cohorts. This cohort variation in after-tax wages and transfer benefits is used to identify own- and cross-price elasticities of demand for and substitution across wage, welfare, and disability income over 1979 to 2001 in the Current Population Survey. To estimate these key parameters I model household preferences with a conditional Almost Ideal Demand System that admits corner solutions, nonseparability, endogenous wages and incomes, and latent heterogeneity via cohort and state fixed effects. I match individual and family-level data in the CPS both with family-specific federal, state, and payroll tax rates, and with state-specific and time-varying benefit levels and effective tax rates in the AFDC and SSI programs. Using a two-limit Tobit instrumental variables estimator I find strong evidence of sizable own and cross-programmatic substitution effects. For example, the estimated elasticities imply that between 1979 and 1999 the increase in the generosity of SSI relative to AFDC accounts for about 40 percent of the average growth in SSI, while the increase in real wages accounts for about one-half of the average decline in AFDC shares over the past two decades. Simulations suggest that changes in relative after-tax wages and transfer-program benefits over the past two decades lead to a substantial “pull” out of cash welfare and into expanded reliance on employment and disability as a means of financial support among single mothers

Recent Developments in Antipoverty Policies in the United States

I survey recent developments in antipoverty policy in the United States over the past decade and examine how the safety net and tax system affects poverty and its correlates using data from the 2000 to 2010 waves of the Current Population Survey-Annual Social and Economic Supplement. Unlike the 1980s and 1990s, and until the health care overhaul in 2009, the first decade of the 21st Century was relatively tepid in terms of major transfer policy reforms. However, real spending on most major social program increased significantly, and in some cases doubled or tripled, in response to demographic shifts and the deep recession. In spite of the real growth in social insurance and means-tested transfer programs, the trends in after-tax and transfer poverty rates were little affected, and if anything, suggest the safety net has lost some of its antipoverty bite in terms of alleviating hardship among those living in deep poverty

Why Are So Many Americans on Food Stamps? The Role of the Economy, Policy, and Demographics

1 in 7 Americans received assistance from SNAP in FY2012, which is a rate 141 percent higher than in FY2000, but only 59 percent higher than in FY1980. In this chapter I describe the socioeconomic and policy climate in recent decades that had bearing on SNAP participation, along with a formal empirical analysis of those determinants and detailed simulations of the relative contributions of the economy, policy, and demographics to changes in SNAP participation over time. The results suggest that SNAP is operating effectively as an automatic fiscal stabilizer—nearly 50 percent of the increase in participation from 2007-2011 is due to the weak economy—but policy reforms expanding access and benefit generosity also affected participation, accounting for nearly 30 percent of the increase after the Great Recession. The changing demographics of the American household are helping restrain growth in SNAP

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

The provision of public assistance to families with children in America faced a watershed moment with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). PRWORA replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which was an entitlement funded via a federal-state matching grant, with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is no longer an entitlement and is financed with a fixed federal block-grant to the states. The impetus for reform had been building for at least the two decades prior to passage, but took on greater currency with the dramatic growth in AFDC caseloads in the early 1990s, with then-Governor Clinton’s vow to “end welfare as we know it” during the 1992 presidential campaign, and with states expansive experimentation with waivers from federal AFDC rules during President Clinton’s first term in office. The state waivers included some elements from prior reform efforts—such as work requirements for benefit eligibility and sanctions for failing to work or participate in a training program—but with teeth. In addition, some states adopted radical new features such as time limits on benefit receipt. Not to be outdone, the Congress jumped on the reform bandwagon and codified some of the waivers into PRWORA, but also added their own twist, including the move to block-grant financing. These policy changes led to a flurry of social science research on the effects of the reform on welfare participation, employment, consumption, saving, health, family structure, and maternal and child well being. The aim of this chapter is to review the research on the TANF program, with a particular emphasis on those studies conducted since the surveys by Blank (2002, 2009), Moffitt (2003), and Grogger and Karoly (2005)

The Appalachian Regional Development Act and Economic Change

The Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 is one of the longest serving place-based regional development programs in the U.S., and is the largest in terms of geographic scope. I use county-level data from the 1960 thru 2000 Decennial Censuses to evaluate the effect of ARDA on poverty rates and real per capita incomes in Appalachia. The intent to treat parameter is identified in a difference-in-difference-in-difference framework by comparing outcomes in Appalachia to her border counties. Additional knowledge of which counties were solely eligible for highway development funds under ARDA from those counties eligible for both highway as well as human development programs helps isolate the average treatment effect on the treated. The results suggest that the ARDA reduced Appalachian poverty between 1960 and 2000 by 4.2 percentage points relative to border counties, or about 10 percent on the baseline 1960 poverty rate, and real per capita incomes grew about 4 percent faster. Comparing grant eligible to grant ineligible counties suggests that about half of poverty reduction can be attributed to highway development programs, and the other half to human development programs. These anti-poverty gains were concentrated exclusively in the Central and Southern Appalachian regions

Income, Program Participation, Poverty, and Financial Vulnerability: Research and Data Needs

The aim of this paper is to assess the adequacy of the data infrastructure in the United States to meet future research and policy evaluation needs as it pertains to income, program participation, poverty, and financial vulnerability. I first discuss some major research themes that are likely to dominate policy and scientific discussions in the coming decade. This list includes research on the long-term consequences of income inequality and mobility, issues of transfer-program participation and intergenerational dependence, challenges with poverty measurement and poverty persistence, and material deprivation. I then summarize what information we currently collect in the U.S. that is used to address these issues, with particular focus on ten national panel datasets that cover these domains and continue to be fielded by the various federal agencies. Included in this section is a discussion of challenges posed by rising income nonresponse and underreporting in many panel surveys. I then conclude with a discussion of how the current panel surveys can be improved to address growing need for social science research on inequality, poverty, and material well being

Tax Reform and Automatic Stabilization

A fundamental property of a progressive income tax is that it provides implicit collective insurance against idiosyncratic shocks to income by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA) and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) greatly reduced the number of marginal tax brackets and the maximum marginal rate, which limits the ability of households to stabilize consumption in the face of transitory fluctuations in taxable income. We examine the effect of the federal income tax reforms of the 1980s on the associated degree of automatic stabilization of consumption. The empirical framework derives from the consumption insurance literature where the ideal outcome is spatially equal changes in households' marginal utilities of consumption. Because evidence for U.S. households rejects complete consumption insurance we begin with a model of partial consumption insurance, which we use to identify how the degree of partial insurance has changed since ERTA and TRA86. Our data come from interview years 1980-1991 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Although in some cases the tax reforms of the 1980s actually increased the automatic stabilization inherent in a progressive income tax (especially when the Social Security payroll tax and the Earned Income Tax Credit are included), our overall outcome is that ERTA and TRA86 reduced consumption stability by about 50 percent. More recent tax reforms, most notably increased EITC generosity, have restored or enhanced consumption insurance.

Filling the Poverty Gap, Then and Now

The extent to which means-tested transfers, social insurance, and tax credits fill the gap between a family’s private resources and the poverty threshold is a periodic barometer of the social safety net. Using data on families from the Current Population Survey I examine how the level and composition of before- and after-tax and after-transfer poverty gaps changed in response to changes in the policy and economic landscapes over the past two decades. The estimates presented here indicate not only dramatic changes in the level and sources of income maintenance programs filling the poverty gap, but also dramatic changes in which demographic groups successfully fill the gap. From the peak-to-peak business-cycle years of 1979 to 1999, the fraction of the gap left unfilled among non-elderly families in poverty has expanded by 25 percent, while the unfilled gap has increased by 50 percent among single female-headed families, families headed by non-whites, and families residing in the Northeast. In a given year the poor in the South fill considerably less of the poverty gap with cash assistance, but make up for much of the shortfall with higher payments of food stamps, SSI, and SSDI. Over time the poor in all regions of the country have substituted SSI, SSDI, and the EITC for cash welfare. Indeed, by 1999 the unfilled gap for families with related children present would be one-fifth larger without the EITC. With the exception of married-couple families, this apparent rate of replacement of disability payments and tax credits for cash assistance is less than one for one, leaving most poor families, especially non-white families and single female-headed families, financially more vulnerable today than in previous decades