The Impacts of the Food Stamp Program on Mortality

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly called the Food Stamp Program or FSP) provided $66.5 billion in nutrition assistance to 44.2 million participants in fiscal year 2016. Prior research has examined the effects of SNAP on many different outcomes, but despite the program’s economic importance and potential health impacts, there are relatively few studies investigating how receiving food stamps affects health outcomes. Even fewer studies have examined SNAP’s health impacts on adult recipients, and these studies' findings are somewhat mixed. Given recent research finding a significantly higher risk of death for food stamp recipients compared to eligible non-recipients, these health effects may be significant. However, no prior study has satisfactorily examined the causal effects of food stamps on adult mortality outcomes.

This study examines the effects of food stamps on health, with a focus on adult health. Specifically, I use the county-level rollout of the FSP from 1961 to 1975 as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in access to food stamps. I examine the effects of contemporaneous and multiple-year access to the FSP on various county-year-level mortality rates using fixed effects models. I consider effects on aggregate mortality rates, subgroup rates for sex, race, and age groups, and rates for specific causes of death to examine the different mechanisms through which food stamps might affect health. I find mixed results for the entire sample that indicate small overall effects of access to food stamps on mortality rates. However, among subsamples of poorer counties that are likely to benefit the most from food stamps, I find that implementation of the FSP reduces mortality rates for most groups over time.