Research
2012
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went to Kentucky’s Martin County to declare war on poverty. The following year he signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act, creating a state-federal partnership to improve the region’s economic prospects through better job opportunities, greater human capital, and enhanced transportation. As the focal point of domestic antipoverty efforts, Appalachia took on special symbolic as well as economic importance. Nearly half a century later, what are the results?
This report presents evidence that spikes in regional and household characteristics played a significant role in the observed 2008 increase in child with very low food security and low food security. Perhaps not surprisingly, unemployment of the household head is found to substantially increase the probability of very low food security and low food insecurity among children. Further, simulations of changes in regional economic conditions indicate rising unemployment rates during the Great Recession explain a significant portion of observed increases in child food insecurity.
This paper exploits a source of variation in the eligibility for federal nutrition programs to identify the program effects on food insecurity. Children are eligible for the WIC program until the day before they turn 61 months old. The result is an age discontinuity in program participation at the 61-month cutoff. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth-cohort dataset, we find strong evidence of a sizeable increase in household food insecurity at the 61-month cutoff.
This paper examines the association between poverty and food insecurity among children using the official measure of poverty and the newsupplemental poverty measure of the Census Bureau based on a more inclusive definition of family resources and needs. Our objective is to study whether the association between food insecurity and poverty improves with a more comprehensive measure of income and needs.
Does the safety net reduce food insecurity in families? In this paper we investigate how the structure of benefits for five major safety net programs – TANF, SSI, EITC, SNAP, and Medicaid – affects low food security in families and very low food security among children. We build a calculator for the years 2001-2009 to impute eligibility and benefits for these programs in each state, taking into account cross-program eligibility rules.
The prevalence of multigenerational families is on the rise in the United States, as is food insecurity. We estimate the effect of resident grandchildren on the risk of and transitions in food insecurity using repeated cross sections and longitudinally linked two-year panels of the Current Population Survey from 2001-2010.
Very low food security among young children is associated with developmental deficiencies. However, little is known about the factors that predict entry into or exit from very low food security during early childhood. This study seeks to, 1) Understand the triggers that explain movements into or out of very low food security among children from birth to age five; and, 2) Examine the first aim using different definitions of food insecurity.
This study seeks to determine the role that parental incarceration plays on the probability of food insecurity among families with children and very low food security of children using micro-level data from the Fragile Families and Child Well Being Study (FFCWS). The data set contains the 18-question food security module which allows us to explore the link between incarceration and food insecurity and very low food security among children, families, and adults.
The Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC) is considered a crucial component of the social safety net in the United States, yet there is limited supporting evidence on the effects of WIC on the nutritional well-being and food security of infants and young children. Two key identification problems have been especially difficult to address. First, the decision to take up WIC is endogenous as households are not randomly assigned to the program; recipients are likely to differ from nonrecipients in unobserved ways (e.g., prior health) that are related to associated outcomes.
Children at the most risk of very low food security are more often being raised in immigrant families. While under a quarter of all children have immigrant parents, a disproportionate amount (40%) comprise the population of children living under the most severe conditions of food insecurity. Family structure is a key predictive factor among low-income families. Cildren living with a single parent or living in a more complex family are at an increased risk of low or very low food security, compared with children living in either a 100% biological family or a stepfamily.