UC San Diego

This dissertation investigates three understudied components of the social safety net and their effects on household purchasing. In the first chapter, I estimate the effect of the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) on household food spending. The SFSP is intended to serve low-income children who receive subsidized meals during the academic year, but it does not directly means test its recipients. I match a large panel of grocery expenditures to plausibly exogeneous variation in SFSP meal provision and find that households reduce their food spending by 2.7% in response to a 10% increase in the number of meals served in their ZIP code. These spending responses are concentrated among middle-income households, showing that the program has large spillovers to unintended populations.

In the second chapter, I study the effect of food pantries on nearby households and grocery retailers. Food pantries have participation rates rivaling the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but little is known about how they affect household purchasing and retailer sales. I create a panel of food pantries using data on 501(c)(3) approval dates from the Internal Revenue Service and connect it to large panels of household grocery expenditures and retailer transactions. I use the plausibly exogeneous timing of approval date to find that households reduce their food spending by 1.8% when a food pantry opens in their ZIP code, and these spending reductions are concentrated in the types of foods that are commonly available at food pantries (such as canned vegetables). I find no effect on retailers’ aggregate sales but find sales increases on produce and dairy that are suggestive of households’ shifting of private consumption toward foodstuffs that may be harder for pantries to distribute.

In the third chapter, we study the effect of sales tax exemptions for diapers on diaper purchasing. We find that low-income households have more elastic demand for diapers using state-level tax changes. We additionally find that low-income households increase their spending by 5.0% when sales taxes are removed entirely from diapers in New York and Connecticut. The results suggest that removing diaper taxes can reduce diaper need.