Food insecurity is a growing U.S. problem among military and veteran families. Data from 2020-21 suggest that between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3 military families experienced food insecurity in the last year: with disabled veterans experiencing even greater risks. This issue brief describes the policy revisions needed to programs such as SNAP, the Social Security Administration's Disability Insurance Program, and the Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation Program to ensure our military members are food secure.
The opioid epidemic has increased adult mortality, disrupted families, and changed labor supply—all factors that are independently associated with poverty and food insecurity. We explore the relationship between the opioid crisis and food insecurity at the state level, first by examining the relationship of drug-related mortalities to food insecurity, and then by exploiting cross-state variations in OxyContin misuse prior to reformulation of the drug to investigate whether food insecurity increased as individuals with opioid use disorder transitioned from prescription to street drugs such as heroin. Results provide further evidence of the presence and size of the social consequences of the opioid crises and the negative consequences associated with drug reformulation for food security.
We provide a brief orientation to the articles that comprise this volume, which is an effort to understand the consequences of the opioid epidemic in a variety of societal and community domains. These domains include child welfare, living arrangements, education, food insecurity, housing, and public budgets, and they are often paid scant attention compared to research that focuses on the direct effects of opioid use. We give an overview of the articles that comprise this volume and discuss the ways in which they contribute new empirical insights on the consequences of the opioid crisis in the U.S. and Canada. We conclude with thoughts on the challenges inherent in this work, insights about how this volume of research might help us understand the broader reach of the epidemic, and how it helps in the development of prosocial public policies.
Th is study examines the ways in which enrollment in the food stamp program affects the mental health status of enrollees. The results find that the negative mental health effects associated with food insufficiency are higher among food stamp participants than nonparticipants. It is estimated that 35.1 million people lived in food-insecure households (Nord, Andrews, and Carlson, 2006) in 2005. Th is means that at some point in the previous year, due to scarce household resources, these families were unable to acquire enough food or were uncertain of having enough food to meet their basic needs. Food insuffi ciency is defined as not having enough to eat periodically over the previous 12 months and is a more severe level of food insecurity. This study examines food insufficiency, rather than food insecurity, due to its relation to food expenditures, and nutritional intake (Basiotis, 1992; Cristofar and Basiotis, 1992). ; Includes bibliographical references
Date of publication unknown ; Date of publication unknown ; The current economic recession has made it difficult for millions of American households to make ends meet and cover basic needs such as food. The largest federal program that supplements food consumption is the Food Stamp Program.1 While typically, you might expect that food insecurity is lower in states that have high rates of participation in the Food Stamp Program, in Missouri we see a very different pattern. At a time when national levels remained relatively constant, Missouri's food insecurity rate rose from 9.8 percent in 1996 to 12.9 percent in 2006. What is noteworthy is that this increase in state levels of food insecurity occurred during a time when participation in the Food Stamp Program in Missouri rose from 74 percent to 98 percent of those eligible. This report shows the intersection and interplay of three metrics commonly used for examining population well being: food insecurity, food stamp participation, and the poverty level. ; Includes bibliographical references
AbstractSupplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the cornerstone food assistance program in the United States and has been shown to reduce the risk of food insecurity. Most research on the causal effect of SNAP on food insecurity relies on the 12‐month food insecurity scale along with usage of SNAP at any point during the year. However, recent social surveys ask about experiences with food insecurity in the 30 days prior to the survey. In this paper, we examine whether similar protective effects of SNAP against food insecurity are obtained whether using the 30‐day or 12‐month food insecurity scale using the December Supplement of the Current Population Survey for 2002–2019. Results indicate comparable average treatment effects of SNAP in mitigating food insecurity across both 30‐day and 12‐month reference periods.
When confronted with the economic costs of addressing a serious health problem, many American households do not possess the ability to deal with the crises on their own and may turn to family members for help. Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we examine if the level of wealth held by individuals is related to the health problems of their siblings. We find evidence that having a sibling who has experienced a health problem decreases the amount of wealth that some families have. The research has implications for the existing literatures on altruism and kin networks, as it sheds some light on the nature of altruism that prevails in U.S. families and on how kinship networks matter. Because of its focus on the consequences of health problems, the research also has implications for public policy discussions about the health care system and social insurance more generally.
Objective. Mental health disorders are of great social, economic, and policy concern. A higher incidence of major depressive disorder has been reported among women living in or near poverty. Our study examines the extent to which the relationship between income and depression is mediated by measures of material hardship.Methods. We use measures of depression at two points in time from the longitudinal Fragile Families Survey to better discern the causal direction of the relationship between income poverty, hardship, and depression. More specifically, we use conditional logistic fixed‐effect models that control for time‐invariant unmeasured heterogeneity in the sample.Results. We found a strong relationship between hardships and depression. The most prominent hardships were problems paying bills and phone turned off. We also found that hardship helped mediate much, though not all, of the link between poverty and depression in the conditional fixed‐effects logistic regression models.Conclusion. Our policy simulations suggest that public health efforts to reduce depression may be enhanced from efforts that focus on specific forms of material hardship.
This article combines the literature on kin networks and racial disparities in asset ownership. Specifically, we examine the effects of kin characteristics—sibling poverty and parental poverty, education, and occupation—on financial account ownership and home ownership. We find that kin matter for these outcomes. Having a poor sibling and coming from a poor family are negatively associated with account and home ownership while mother's education has a positive effect. Separate analyses by race suggest that kin characteristics matter for both Blacks and Whites for account ownership, but for home ownership they are significant for Whites only. Racial differences in kin characteristics account for over half of the racial gap in account ownership, but are not important for understanding the racial gap in home ownership. The significant effects of extended family characteristics on socioeconomic well‐being make a case for the inclusion of kin variables in the growing literature on wealth disparities among Blacks and Whites.
AbstractWe use longitudinal data from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study from 2002 to 2016 to document how Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation and estimated take‐up changed over time for older adults and the role that out‐of‐pocket medical expenses has played in these changing patterns. We rely upon the state adoption of Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act as a source of identifying variation and do not find evidence that Medicaid expansion changed estimated SNAP take‐up or participation. These findings suggest that out‐of‐pocket medical expenses are unlikely to be a major driver of SNAP take‐up decisions for the nondisabled population under age 65.
