Almost fifty million people are food insecure in the United States, which makes food insecurity one of the nation's leading health and nutrition issues. We examine recent research evidence of the health consequences of food insecurity for children, nonsenior adults, and seniors in the United States. For context, we first provide an overview of how food insecurity is measured in the country, followed by a presentation of recent trends in the prevalence of food insecurity. Then we present a survey of selected recent research that examined the association between food insecurity and health outcomes. We show that the literature has consistently found food insecurity to be negatively associated with health. For example, after confounding risk factors were controlled for, studies found that food-insecure children are at least twice as likely to report being in fair or poor health and at least 1.4 times more likely to have asthma, compared to food-secure children; and food-insecure seniors have limitations in activities of daily living comparable to those of food-secure seniors fourteen years older. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) substantially reduces the prevalence of food insecurity and thus is critical to reducing negative health outcomes.

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Food insecurity is now recognized as a major health crisis in the United States. This is due to the size of the problem—more than 42 million persons were food insecure in 2015—as well as the multiple negative health outcomes and higher health care costs attributable to food insecurity. An extensive body of literature from multiple fields has examined the causes and consequences of food insecurity and the efficacy of food assistance programs—especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. We review this literature and provide suggestions for future research directions. We suggest examining the distribution of food insecurity within households, the impact of the food distribution system on food insecurity, the coping mechanisms of low‐income food secure families, food insecurity among American Indians, the effects of charitable food assistance, the causal relationship between food insecurity and health outcomes, the declining age gradient in food insecurity among Seniors, the effects of labor force participation and the Great Recession on food insecurity, and the long‐term consequences of food insecurity. In addition, the impact of two recent policy recommendations on food insecurity – the minimum wage and the Affordable Care – Act should be considered.

Abstract-We address long-standing concerns in the literature on compensating wage differentials: the econometric properties of the estimated value of statistical life (VSL) and the wide range of such estimates. We confront prominent econometric issues using panel data, a more accurate fatality risk measure, and systematic application of panel data estimators. Controlling for measurement error, endogeneity, latent individual heterogeneity possibly correlated with regressors, state dependence, and sample composition yields VSL estimates of $4 million to $10 million. The comparatively narrow range clarifies the cost-effectiveness of regulatory decisions. Most important econometrically is controlling for latent heterogeneity; less important is how one does it.

In 2012, nearly 16 million U.S. children, or over one in five, lived in households that were food-insecure, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited access to food.” Even when we control for the effects of other factors correlated with poverty, these children are more likely than others to face a host of health problems, including but not limited to anemia, lower nutrient intake, cognitive problems, higher levels of aggression and anxiety, poorer general health, poorer oral health, and a higher risk of being hospitalized, having asthma, having some birth defects, or experiencing behavioral problems. Many government programs aim explicitly to reduce food insecurity, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), the School Breakfast Program (SBP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). (Other social safety-net programs—for example, the Earned Income Tax Credit—can also help alleviate food insecurity by increasing household income.) The fact that food insecurity remains so high even though the government spent over $100 billion on the various federal food-assistance programs in fiscal year 2012 poses a significant policy challenge. Food insecurity rates remain stubbornly high for a number of reasons. One is that we don’t fully understand what causes food insecurity or how food assistance and other programs can help alleviate it. Food insecurity has been researched extensively, and this research has helped policy makers and program administrators better address the problem. However, relatively little research has looked at what causes food insecurity among children in the first place, or the effectiveness of public policies, especially on more severe forms of food hardship. In this policy report, we highlight new research that seeks to fill this gap. Much of this work comes from the Research Program on Childhood Hunger at the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, which was underwritten by the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Abstract:We offer new evidence on earnings volatility of men and women in the United States over the past four decades by using matched data from the March Current Population Survey.We construct a measure of total volatility that encompasses both permanent and transitory instability, and that admits employment transitions and losses from self employment. We also present a detailed decomposition of earnings volatility to account for changing shares in employment probabilities, conditional variances of continuous workers, and conditional mean variances from labor-force entry and exit. Our results show that earnings volatility among men increased by 15 percent from the early 1970s to mid 1980s, while women's volatility fell, and each stabilized thereafter. However, this pooled series masks important heterogeneity in volatility levels and trends across education groups and marital status. We find that men's earnings volatility is increasingly accounted for by employment transitions, especially exits, while the share of women's volatility accounted for by continuous workers rose, each of which highlights the importance of allowing for periods of non-work in volatility studies. 1Whether and to what extent the volatility of earnings and income have increased in the United States in recent decades has been the subject of much research and debate Moffitt 1994, 2009;Dynarski and Gruber 1997;Haider 2001; Kniesner and Ziliak 2002a,b;Gundersen and Ziliak 2003;Dahl, DeLeire, and Schwabish 2008;Dynan, Elmendorf, and Sichel 2008;Hacker and Jacobs 2008; Jensen and Shore 2008; Keys 2008;Shin and Solon 2008;Winship 2009). Starting with Gottschalk and Moffitt (1994), the focus on volatility trends centered on identifying whether rising cross-sectional income inequality stemmed in part from transitory instability, while in more recent years interest in volatility expanded to concerns raised by Hacker and Jacobs (2008), among others, that there have been fundamental changes in the labor market that shifted more idiosyncratic and business cycle risk onto individuals. Whereas the preponderance of evidence on inequality in the United States is based on cross-section data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), with few exceptions the evidence on earnings and income volatility comes almost exclusively from longitudinal data in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (Gittleman and Joyce 1996;Cameron and Tracy 1998;Dahl, et al. 2008;Celik, et al. 2009; Juhn and McCue 2010;Winship 2011). In this paper we offer new evidence on earnings volatility over the past four decades by exploiting the longitudinal dimension of the CPS to match individuals across surveys.The use of the PSID for estimates of volatility owes in part to the literature's early emphasis on decomposing volatility into its permanent and transitory components (Gottschalk and Moffitt 1994). This decomposition is illustrative because it permits identification of temporary deviations of earnings from long-term trends, as well as identification of structural changes in long-term tre...

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America’s rural-urban divide seemingly has never been greater, a point reinforced by large geographic disparities in support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. But it is also the case that big cities and rural communities are more tightly integrated than ever and are increasingly interdependent, both economically and socially. This new rural-urban interface is highlighted in this collection of articles, which are organized and developed around the general concept of changing symbolic and social boundaries. Rural-urban boundaries—how rural and urban people and places are defined and evaluated—reflect and reinforce institutional forces that maintain spatial inequality and existing social, economic, and political hierarchies. This volume makes clear that rural-urban boundaries are highly fluid and that this should be better reflected in research programs, in the topics that we choose to study, and in the way that public policy is implemented.