Estimating the Risk of Food Stamp Use and Impoverishment During Childhood

Abstract

To estimate the lifetime risk that an American child will reside in a household receiving food stamps and, as a result, will encounter poverty and a heightened exposure to food insecurity. Design: Thirty years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics survey data set. Setting: Nationally representative sample of the US population. Participants: Approximately 90 000 childhood years of information are pooled together to create a series of life tables that span the ages of 1 to 20 years. Main Outcome Measure: Self-reporting measure of whether survey households received the Food Stamp Program during the prior year.

Who Receives Food Stamps During Adulthood? Analyzing Repeatable Events With Incomplete Event Histories

“…This is problematic because the cumulative probability of food stamp receipt has an upward bias that escalates with age. In another study, Rank and Hirschl (2009) estimated the proportion of children who receive food stamps by age 20 and omitted late entrants, as we do here. They also published analyses of the proportion of adults who experience poverty.…”

Federal Food Policy And Childhood Obesity: A Solution Or Part Of The Problem?

“…One-half of all U.S. children will participate at some point in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program alone, including 90 percent of African American children. 19 At the same time, there is also reason to question the programs' ability to combat the obesity epidemic. 20 These programs were originally designed to encourage food expenditures at a time when alleviating hunger-rather than preventing obesity-was the primary policy objective.…”

The effects of economic instability on children's educational outcomes

“…Welfare is typically thought of as a program geared toward helping poor families smooth out income shocks though about half of all Americans, low-income or not, will receive assistance by a welfare program at some point in their life. For example, Rank and Hirschl (2009) find that one half of U.S. children between ages 1 and 20 will live in a family that uses food stamps for some period of time. This implies, even though welfare is portrayed as being for the poor, in reality the non-poor also benefit from welfare programs.…”