Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Distributional Effects Of Welfare Reform Experiments: A Panel Quantile Regression Examination, Carlos Lamarche, Robert Paul Hartley

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

In an influential article, Bitler, Gelbach and Hoynes (American Economic Re- view, 2006; 96, 988-1012) illustrate the importance of estimating heterogeneous impacts of welfare reform experiments. They find that the mean treatment effect offers an uninfor- mative summary of opposing effects, while the treatment effects are significantly different across quantiles. We replicate their results and evaluate the robustness of their findings to accounting for individual-specific heterogeneity possibly associated with welfare program participation. We find results that are in general similar to Bitler’s et al. findings, although the interpretation of labor supply effects in the upper tail is revised. We find …

The Health And Nutrition Effects Of Snap: Selection Into The Program And A Review Of The Literature On Its Effects, Marianne Bitler

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

The goal of this paper is to assess the existing state of knowledge about whether SNAP improves health and nutrition outcomes, and if so, which ones and by how much.

In an era of fiscal crisis, knowing whether SNAP has any significant causal effect on health and nutrition is crucial for informing policy decisions and policy makers. In this review, I pay particular attention to the challenges researchers face in overcoming selection bias and identifying causal effects of the program, and I will assess the literature through that lens. The fundamental challenge in program evaluation in general and in assessing …