Abstract
Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1968 to 2005, we estimate the cumulative probability that young adults in the United States will receive food stamps during adulthood, and examine how that probability varies with an individual’s income and education at age 25 as well as by race and gender. We find that the probability of first food stamp receipt as an adult declines sharply with age, indicating that most adult recipients do so by age 40. Also, those receiving food stamps in early adulthood are likely to receive them again. For these reasons, and because food stamp receipt is a repeatable event, life table analyses that include individuals who are not observed until after they become exposed to the risk of food stamp receipt (whom we label “late entrants”) are likely to overstate cumulative participation during adulthood. For example, one often-cited study included individuals who enter their sample after age 20 (late entrants) and report that 50.8% of 20-year-olds are recipients by age 65. In contrast, when we exclude late entrants, we find that 39.2% of 20-year-olds and 29.7% of 25-year-olds receive benefits during adulthood.
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Notes
It is possible to discern whether an observed spell is the first if the events are likely to be easily recalled, as is the case with repeatable events like marriage and divorce, or if the timing can be deduced from information collected during the course of the interview (such as using children’s reported ages to deduce timing of childbirths).
Rank and Hirschl acknowledged that including late entrants (what they call “left censorship”) could bias estimates of the cumulative proportion receiving food stamps. To address this, they employed a “correction” in which they compared the shape of their survival curve with the shape of the survival curve when they excluded late entrants; they reported finding little difference between the two estimates. Because they had access to fewer waves of data than are now available, they were unable to examine the degree of bias at older ages. 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. Some of these studies included late entrants (Rank and Hirschl 1999, 2001b), but others excluded them (Rank and Hirschl 2001a; Sandoval et al. 2009).
Until the 1990s, when an immigrant subsample was added, the PSID was representative only of the nonimmigrant population. We do not include subsample members for whom data are available for only a few years. PSID documentation is available online at http://www.psidonline.psc.isr.umich.edu.
Ratner and Danziger (2008) found that this method of determining Food Stamp Program participation yields rates comparable with those based on Current Population Survey data.
Our assumption that food stamp receipt during a year in which the PSID did not collect information about receipt is the same as that of the previous year affects only those who did not previously receive food stamps. Respondents who did receive food stamps in the previous year would already be removed from the risk set. Because receipt in one year is positively associated with receipt in a subsequent year (Russo and Faux 2003; U.S. Census Bureau 1999), a respondent who experiences a food stamp spell during a one-year observational gap is likely to have experienced another spell shortly before or after the gap. Thus, our assumption would lead to a bias in the age-specific probability of first-time food stamp receipt, but the effect on cumulative failure/survival probabilities should be relatively small because the time between the unobserved and observed spell is small (as short as one year). More problematic are late entrants: those respondents whose food stamp experiences are not observed until many years after they are first exposed to risk.
We also show results that begin at age 20 because that is the starting age in Rank and Hirschl (2005).
Unfortunately, small sample sizes require us to exclude nonblack/nonwhite respondents.
This differs from the income-to-needs variable included with the PSID data file. Grieger et al. (2009) showed that the method produces annual poverty rates that are very similar to those published by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Starting the analysis at age 20 and excluding late entrants allows us to calculate cumulative probabilities only up to age 57, preventing an exact comparison to Rank and Hirschl. Because of declining age-specific probabilities of first food stamp receipt, very few individuals beyond age 57 (but before reaching retirement age) receive benefits for the first time.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Grant Agreement #43-3AEM-5-80056 from the Economic Research Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and by funds provided to the National Poverty Center by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (5U01 AE000002-03). Mary Corcoran, Peter Gottschalk, Robert Schoeni, Yu Xie, and two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments on a previous version. Any opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and not those of any sponsoring agency or organization.
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Grieger, L.D., Danziger, S.H. Who Receives Food Stamps During Adulthood? Analyzing Repeatable Events With Incomplete Event Histories. Demography 48, 1601–1614 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0056-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0056-x