Research
Research
Voucher Structure and Firm Participation in In-Kind Transfer Programs: Evidence from SNAP and WIC
Many in-kind transfer programs rely on private firms to deliver benefits. I show that firms' willingness to participate in these programs depends on how the benefit is structured. Quantity-based vouchers, which entitle recipients to a fixed basket of goods, require price controls to contain program costs; value-based vouchers, which simply add purchasing power, do not. I test whether this distinction matters to firms in the context of two nutrition assistance programs: WIC (a quantity voucher) and SNAP (a value voucher). Using administrative data on California grocery vendors and local minimum wage increases as shocks to firm costs, I find that the number of firms accepting WIC per capita falls by 3 percent in the year following a wage increase, with no change in SNAP participation. Over the same time frame, WIC redemptions fall by 3.5 percent while enrollment remains unchanged, indicating that thinning vendor networks impede access even among recipients who remain enrolled. These results show that voucher design can influence firm participation in in-kind transfer programs, shaping not only which firms deliver benefits, but how sensitive that participation is to conditions outside the program's control.
Is a Dollar a Dollar? How Transfer Design Shapes Household Spending with Krista Ruffini and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach
Government transfers vary along two design dimensions that standard models predict should not matter: whether benefits are paid in cash or kind, and whether they arrive as one-time or recurring payments. We test to what extent these design choices a!ect household spending using sharp changes in four pandemic-era transfers to lowincome families with children: one-time food vouchers, monthly food benefits, one-time cash payments, and monthly cash payments. Linking variation in benefit timing and amount to high-frequency household scanner data, we estimate spending responses in a harmonized di!erence-in-di!erences and event-study framework. We find that households spend more out of in-kind benefits than out of cash transfers of similar value, and more out of recurring payments than out of one-time transfers in the short-run. Our estimates produce the first internally comparable set of shortrun food-store MPCs across di!erent transfer types ranging from 0.18 (one-time) and 0.38 (monthly) for in-kind benefits, versus 0.06 (one-time) and 0.20 (monthly) for cash. The patterns suggest that the form and timing of transfers systematically shape household spending in ways that are consistent with mental accounting, labeling, and forward-looking responses. More broadly, our results imply that transfer design-not just generosity and targeting-is a first-order policy lever for both social insurance and short-run demand stabilization.
Paid Maternity Leave and Children's Outcomes in the Long Run (with Johanna Rayl)
The US is one of few countries worldwide without a national mandate for paid maternity leave, and as such, we know little about the effects of paid leave in this context. The first cases of statewide maternity leave in the U.S. came about somewhat unintentionally through changes in state Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) in the 1960s and 1970s. Six to seven decades later, we have the opportunity to explore the long run effects of access to paid maternity leave on children, later in their lives. We do so employing a differences-in-discontinuities design around changes in state TDI policies which made disability insurance available for pregnancy. In "first stage" results, we provide new estimates of the effects of paid maternity leave availability on infant birth weights, improving upon existing methodologies estimating the same effect in the literature, and finding much larger positive effects. In a "second stage" exercise, we will link measures of the education and earnings of children with their birthdate records using Census and Numident data to provide the first estimates of the long run impacts of paid maternity leave on children for the US.
Unconditional Cash Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of the Dynamic Effects of Guaranteed Income in the U.S. (with Eleni Packis, Tre Wells, Aastha Rajan, and Sheridan Fuller)
Trends in the School Lunch Program: Changes in Selection, Nutrition & Health with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach (Food Policy. April 2024)
There has been significant media attention on the issue of childhood obesity, leading policymakers to reform the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to include stricter nutritional requirements. We use data on school lunch menus to document improvements in the nutritional quality of school meals between 1991 and 2010. We then evaluate how this change in nutritional content maps into obesity outcomes, using panel data on a nationally representative cohort of children, tracking them from kindergarten entry in fall 2010 through the end of fifth grade in spring 2016. We find little evidence that participation in the school lunch program leads to weight gain, as measured by changes in obesity, overweight, and BMI. These results suggest that improvements in the nutritional content of school lunches have been largely successful in reversing the previously negative relationship between school lunches and childhood obesity. Unrelated to school lunch participation, we find a strong relationship between mother’s obesity status and both the level and growth of children’s obesity, especially for girls and among high-SES families.
Evanston Guaranteed Income Pilot Program Research Report (with Claire Mackevicius, Phoebe Lin, Sheridan Fuller, Tre Wells, and Pilar Manzi)