Wagner Seminar Series ― Jesse Shapiro

Presented by the Wagner Doctoral Program

November
09
4:00pm - 5:30pm EST
Public
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Date:
November 09, 2017
Time:
4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location:
New Location

*Please note this talk will take place at Furman Hall, 245 Sullivan St., Room 326.

Jesse Shapiro, Brown University 

Title: "How are SNAP Benefits Spent? Evidence from a Retail Panel" 



We use a novel retail panel with more than six years of detailed transaction records to study the effect of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on household spending. We frame our approach using novel administrative data from the state of Rhode Island. The marginal propensity to consume SNAP-eligible food (MPCF) out of SNAP benefits is 0.5 to 0.6. The MPCF out of cash is much smaller. These patterns obtain even for households for whom SNAP benefits are economically equivalent to cash in the sense that benefits do not cover all food spending. We reject the hypothesis that households respect the fungibility of money in a semiparametric framework. A model with mental accounting can match the facts.

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