How Are SNAP Benefits Spent? Evidence from a Retail Panel

This work has been supported (in part) by awards from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1658037, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Policies for Action program, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and should not be construed as representing the opinions of these Foundations. We also appreciate support from the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. This project benefited from the suggestions of Ken Chay, Raj Chetty, David Cutler, Amy Finkelstein, John Friedman, Roland Fryer, Xavier Gabaix, Peter Ganong, Ed Glaeser, Nathan Hendren, Hilary Hoynes, Larry Katz, David Laibson, Kevin Murphy, Mandy Pallais, Devin Pope, Matthew Rabin, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Andrei Shleifer, Erik Snowberg, and Anthony Zhang, from audience comments at Brown University, Clark University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, UC San Diego, New York University, Columbia University, the Vancouver School of Economics, the University of Southern California, UT Austin, the Quantitative Marketing and Economics Conference, NBER Summer Institute, and from comments by discussant J.P. Dubé. We thank our dedicated research assistants for their contributions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• online appendix

• January 26, 2017
• June 6, 2017
• February 20, 2018