Abstract
The major food assistance programs in the United States—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children—all share the fundamental goal of helping needy and vulnerable people obtain access to nutritious foods that they might not otherwise be able to afford, but the programs may also affect households’ well-being in other ways. In this study, we examine how the receipt of public and private food assistance is associated with regular family routines, using longitudinal data on low-income families with children from the Three City Study. Estimates from fixed-effects regression models indicate that WIC participation is positively associated with homework routines and consistent bed times. However, receipt of other assistance is not strongly associated with family routines.
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Notes
Conversely, if SNAP participation leads to plentiful food early in a month when benefits are issued but shortages later in the month when benefits are exhausted (Wilde and Ranney 2000), breakfast routines could be disrupted.
Although the focal children in our analysis sample were too old to be eligible for WIC, they may have had other household members who were eligible. Woodward and Ribar (2012) report evidence that WIC assistance may be shared among household members.
In sensitivity analyses, we also included specific binary indicators for the presence of an infant and for the presence of preschool age children; these controls were not significant and did not change our results.
For our descriptive analyses, we also report time-invariant characteristics, including the race, ethnicity, nativity, and educational attainment of the caregiver, the gender of the focal child, and the city of residence. The descriptive analyses also include the ages of the caregiver and focal child, which are collinear with the wave indicators in the fixed effects analyses.
We also estimated longitudinal random-effects models; however, Hausman-Wu tests rejected the random-effects specifications for most of the family routine outcomes.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) under Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Program Cooperative Agreement no. 58-4000-2-0073. They thank Chuck Courtemanche, Christian Gregory, Chris Ruhm, seminar participants at the Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics and at Elon University, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the USDA or of their respective institutions.
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Ribar, D.C., Zapata, D. Food assistance and family routines in three American Cities. Rev Econ Household 15, 223–238 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9270-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9270-9