Family Health Shocks and Food Insecurity: The Role of Food Assistance Programs

Food insecurity, which represents deprivation of an essential aspect of human well-being, has increased substantially in the U.S. over the past decade.   Income is perhaps the strongest known correlate of food insecurity, although many poor families do not experience food insecurity and some non-poor families are food insecure.

Gundersen and Gruber posited that unexpected negative changes to a household’s budget can make a family vulnerable to food insufficiency, and therefore, it is necessary to move beyond current or average income to consider other aspects of financial wherewithal as explanations for food insufficiency.  Recent research has found that adverse health shocks can affect a family’s financial constraints, and therefore can affect both income and expenditures.  The theoretical arguments posited by Gundersen and Gruber, along with the economic literature on the effects of health on individuals’ economic outcomes, suggest that exogenous health shocks would have adverse effects on food insecurity.

In this study, we explore the extent to which exogenous health shocks affect family food insecurity as well as the extent to which food assistance programs buffer those effects. We use data from two national surveys (the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Program Birth Cohort) to explore the effects of two different types of health shocks in the family, abnormal infant health conditions and maternal postpartum depression. We exploit shocks that are arguably exogenous, explore exogeneity assumptions, use rich control variables, and employ econometric techniques designed to address potential endogeneity that may remain. After obtaining robust estimates, we explore the extent to which food assistance programs (SNAP, WIC, SBP, SLP) mitigate the effects.

The findings will point to the importance of family health events in triggering food insecurity and provide important information on the role (and potential role) that food assistance programs play in buffering those effects.