Suchergebnisse

AbstractOver 5 million persons aged 60 and older are food insecure in the United States. Research on food insecurity among seniors, however, has been sparse. In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service (USDA, FNS) funded a series of studies in this research area. In this introduction, we describe trends and consequences of food insecurity among seniors followed by an overview of the nine funded projects. These papers constitute a second round of papers funded by USDA in this research area –the first round was published in volume 44, issue 2 of this journal.

AbstractOver 5 million persons aged 60 and older are food insecure in the United States. Previous research has uncovered information about the causes and consequences of food insecurity, but, especially in comparison to households with children, research on food insecurity among seniors has been sparse. In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service (USDA, FNS) funded a series of studies in this research area. In this introduction, we describe how food insecurity is measured and trends in food insecurity among seniors followed by an overview of the eight funded projects.

We review the literature on the expansion of the Child Tax Credit in 2021, as it relates to food and financial hardship among households with children in the U.S. Extant scholarship consistently finds that receipt of the expanded tax credit is associated with an increase in food purchases and declines in food insufficiency and food insecurity. The effects of the tax credit expansion also vary by the socioeconomic characteristics of families. There are important differences, though, in effect sizes across studies, indicating that data sources, timeframe of analysis, and the way in which food hardship is measured all matter to the accurate estimation of effects. The effect of the credit on financial hardship is less conclusive, with the literature finding generally insignificant effects on measures such as difficulty paying rent or bills.

Food insecurity, defined as a condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food, is a widely used measure of well-being in the U.S. The survey module in the Current Population Survey (CPS) that is used to generate the official U.S. food insecurity measure is also included on multiple waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), offering the first opportunity to answer key research questions on the persistence of food insecurity within and across generations. We assess the validity of the food insecurity measure in the PSID by comparing it to the CPS. We find that, although estimated food insecurity rates in the PSID are lower than those in the CPS, the trends over time in the two datasets are similar, and the rates converge from the 1999–2003 period to the 2015–17 period. Our findings lend credence to the use of the PSID for food insecurity research.

Abstract
Our research presents new evidence on the age pattern of the implicit value of life revealed from workers' differential wages and job safety pairings. Although aging reduces the number of years of life expectancy, aging can affect the value of life through an effect on planned life-cycle consumption. The elderly could, a priori, have the highest implicit value of life if there is a life-cycle plan to defer consumption until old age. We find that largely due to the age pattern of consumption, which is non-constant, the implicit value of life rises and falls over the lifetime in a way that the value for the elderly is higher than the average over all ages or for the young. There are important health policy implications of our empirical results. Because there may be age-specific benefits of programs to save statistical lives, instead of valuing the lives of the elderly at less than the young, health policymakers should more correctly value the lives of the elderly at as much as twice the young because of relatively greater consumption lost when accidental death occurs.