The Impact of Pandemic Financial Support on Household Food Insecurity

• In Event: Understanding Food and Transportation Security and Policies to Address Them

Abstract

The United States federal government expanded financial support to needy families during the COVID-19 pandemic to levels not seen before. These policies were linked to substantial declines in child poverty rates, but additional evidence can help better assess their impact on food insecurity. Research on the connection between pandemic financial support and food hardship has examined the effects of single policies on short-term measures of food insufficiency. Past studies rely primarily on cross-sectional data and may not fully account for the impacts of other policy changes during the pandemic. This paper adds to the existing literature by testing the relationship between annual measures of financial assistance received by households during the pandemic and annual household food insecurity using panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The availability of household panel data allows me to more accurately estimate the causal impact of these programs by only exploiting changes to annual benefits that occurred within households. I impute benefit levels for households in the SIPP to show that federal assistance became considerably more generous during the pandemic and then use changes in the amount of assistance received within households to test how expected financial assistance impacted the likelihood that households experienced food insecurity. I find that an additional $1,000 of financial assistance during the pandemic reduced the incidence of food insecurity among low- and middle-income households by 1.0 percentage points. The effect of assistance was about 20 percent larger for low-income households and nearly identical for liquidity-constrained households. Interactions with household demographics indicate that the impacts are largest and concentrated among unmarried and female-headed households. While additional financial assistance appears to have increased the likelihood households report having any savings, I do not find evidence that assistance significantly altered household balance sheets. Additional analyses suggest that past research using cross-sectional data may understate the impacts of assistance from these programs on food insecurity.

Author

• Jack Kroger, RAND School of Public Policy
  Presenting Author