Using statewide administrative records to examine the timing of SNAP Benefit receipt and children’s academic achievement

• In Event: 1-008 - Using Administrative Data to Examine Development

Abstract

The largest food assistance program in the U.S. and an important part of the U.S. safety net, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly Food Stamps) provides cash-like benefits to low-income individuals and families to use only for purchasing food. This paper links the timing of SNAP benefit receipt to children’s end-of-grade (EOG) achievement test scores in North Carolina (NC).

Data and method. Data on student test scores were provided by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC), which maintains all public school students’ administrative records and makes them available to researchers, through a cooperative agreement with the NC Department of Public Instruction. All 3rd- through 8th-grade students in NC take EOG tests in reading and math. This paper utilizes EOG test scores files from the 2011-2012 academic year, which include the exact date that students took the EOG tests. Data on students’ SNAP benefit receipt were provided through a cooperative agreement between first author and the Division of Social Services in the NC Department of Health and Human Services. The SNAP data include recipient children’s names, birth dates, and addresses, as well as benefit amounts and date of benefit transfer. Research staff at the NCERDC matched the student test and SNAP administrative data. Approximately 85% of SNAP-receiving children were matched with their test scores.

Important to our design, in NC, SNAP benefits are disbursed at different points in the calendar month, determined by the last digit of the recipient’s social security number (SSN). When EOG tests are administered within a school, some SNAP-receiving children are in households that have just received benefit payments but other children are in households at the end of their monthly cycle. Thus, this study is a quasi-experiment where the treatment is recency of receipt of monthly SNAP payment. The distribution of treatment is essentially random, as it is determined only by the last digit of participants’ SSNs.

Results. Students’ EOG performance in both reading and math varied based on the recency of SNAP benefit transfer (Table 1). Although the relationship is stronger for reading than for math, the relationship between students’ test scores and SNAP receipt is curvilinear, with test scores peaking between two and three weeks after SNAP transfer (Figure 1).

Authors

• Anna Gassman-Pines, Duke University
  Presenting Author

• Laura Bellows, Duke University