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Author: Ghadyani, Samaneh
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Ghadyani, Samaneh
Essays on SNAP Participation, BMI, and Food Purchasing Decisions
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of South Florida, 2021
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Geocoded Data; Legislation; Program Participation/Evaluation; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Chapter 1 studies the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) on SNAPeligible individuals' BMI. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest program in the U.S. to protect low-income families from hunger. Although decreasing food insecurity is universally approved, the SNAP program is not without its critiques. Many studies have reported a link between participation in SNAP and obesity among the poor. In this study, the effects of an expansion of SNAP benefits on SNAP-eligible individuals' BMI compared to ineligible people are examined. The expansion introduced by ARRA increased the average value of benefits for SNAP recipients by about 13.6% compared to the previous year. Accounting for the endogeneity of an explanatory variable and systematic underreporting of participation status are the primary challenges of finding the SNAP's causal impacts on BMI. The difference-in-differences model is estimated the ARRA-related SNAP-expansion on SNAP-eligible people's BMI to address the mentioned challenges. Restricted data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 is used, which is a panel of 12,686 individuals aged 14 to 22 years old in the first year of the interview (1979). The fixed-effect estimation results suggest that SNAP expansion increased the BMI rates among SNAP-eligible adults; however, quantile regression shows a different portrait of changes across the whole sample. Although people in lower quantiles of BMI started to lose weight, individuals in higher quantiles reacted significantly different to this event.
Bibliography Citation
Ghadyani, Samaneh. Essays on SNAP Participation, BMI, and Food Purchasing Decisions. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of South Florida, 2021.