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America's rural-urban divide seemingly has never been greater, a point reinforced by large geographic disparities in support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. But it is also the case that big cities and rural communities are more tightly integrated than ever and are increasingly interdependent, both economically and socially. This new rural-urban interface is highlighted in this collection of articles, which are organized and developed around the general concept of changing symbolic and social boundaries. Rural-urban boundaries—how rural and urban people and places are defined and evaluated—reflect and reinforce institutional forces that maintain spatial inequality and existing social, economic, and political hierarchies. This volume makes clear that rural-urban boundaries are highly fluid and that this should be better reflected in research programs, in the topics that we choose to study, and in the way that public policy is implemented.

Objectives. This study examines whether the mental health consequences associated with food insufficiency vary by food stamp participation status and/or the value of the food stamp benefit received.Methods. We use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics along with fixed‐effect methods that control for unobserved heterogeneity to test our hypotheses.Results. We find that, conditional on the food stamp benefit amount, the emotional distress associated with food insufficiency is higher among food stamp participants. Moreover, we find evidence of a dosage effect such that food‐insufficient individuals who receive higher amounts of food stamp benefits suffer greater emotional distress than food‐insufficient individuals who receive lower levels of food stamp benefits. However, the negative mental health effects of food insufficiency and food stamp participation are driven primarily by periods of transition onto the Food Stamp Program and into food insufficiency.Conclusions. The negative mental health aspects of participating in the Food Stamp Program seem to outweigh the positive mental health aspects, at least during the period of application and initial receipt, suggesting that programmatic reform is needed to improve overall well‐being among new participants.

An income tax provides implicit insurance by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption. Using an empirical framework derived from the consumption insurance literature and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics we examine the effect of federal income tax reforms of the 1980's on automatic stabilization of consumption. Overall, ERTA and TRA86 reduced consumption stability by about 50 percent. Recently increased EITC generosity restored or enhanced consumption insurance. The welfare cost of moving to the post-TRA86 system is sizable for relatively risk-averse households facing large income risk but is much more modest for the typical household.

By supplementing income explicitly through payments or implicitly through taxes collected, income-based taxes and transfers make disposable income less variable. Because disposable income determines consumption, policies that smooth disposable income also create welfare improving consumption insurance. With data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics we find that annual consumption variation is reduced by almost 20 percent due to explicit and implicit income smoothing. Consumption insurance is as important economically as private health or automobile insurance. Although taxes have become an increasingly important source of consumption insurance, the 2001 income-tax reform legislation should have little effect on implicit consumption insurance.