Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Snap And Food Consumption, Hilary W. Hoynes, Leslie Mcgranahan, Diane W. Schanzenbach

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

In this paper we describe the relationship between SNAP and food consumption. We first present the neoclassical framework for analyzing in-kind transfers, which unambiguously predicts that SNAP will increase food consumption, and then describe the SNAP benefit formula. We then present new evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey on food spending patterns among households overall, SNAP recipients, and other subgroups of interest. We find that a substantial fraction of SNAP-eligible households spend an amount that is above the program’s needs standard. We also show that the relationship between family size and food spending is steeper than the slope of the …