IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/usdami/310389.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

COVID-19 Working Paper: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer Redemptions during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Author

Listed:
  • Jordan W. Jones

Abstract

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic led to an economic contraction in the United States in 2020, predictably leading to an increase in the dollar amount of food assistance benefits issued to households. Previous economic downturns provide limited precedent to understand the growth in food assistance benefits during this pandemic, especially considering the speed of the economic contraction and the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. To quantify part of the growth in food assistance benefits, this analysis explores monthly patterns in combined Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) redemptions through September 2020, compares these patterns with recent years, and explores changes in the types of food retailers at which redemptions are made. This analysis uses 2017-20 data from the Food and Nutrition Service’s (FNS) Store Tracking and Redemption System (STARS) on the monthly value and store type of SNAP and P-EBT benefit redemptions, as well as data from the Economic Research Service’s (ERS) Food Expenditure Series on the value of food-at-home expenditures. Overall, an average of $8.4 billion in combined SNAP and P-EBT benefits were redeemed per month during the 6-month period of April through September 2020—an increase of 86.4 percent compared to the same period in 2019. These benefits accounted for an average of 11.7 percent of expenditures on food at home during the April-September 2020 period—an increase of 72.1 percent compared to the same period in 2019. The share of benefits redeemed at super stores increased, while the share of benefits redeemed at other store types decreased relative to previous years. The value of benefits redeemed online also grew quickly, from $2.9 million in February 2020 to $196.3 million in September 2020. By September, online redemptions accounted for 2.4 percent of the total value.

Suggested Citation

  • Jordan W. Jones, 2021. "COVID-19 Working Paper: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer Redemptions during the Coronavirus Pandemic," USDA Miscellaneous 310389, United States Department of Agriculture.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:usdami:310389
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.310389
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/310389/files/ap-089.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/310389/files/ap-089_2.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.310389?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Leschewski, Andrea & Melo, Grace & Jones, Jordan W., 2022. "The SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot’s Impact on Food Sufficiency During the Covid-19 Pandemic," 2022 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Anaheim, California 322060, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    2. Toossi, Saied & Jones, Jordan W. & Hodges, Leslie, 2021. "The Food and Nutrition Assistance Landscape: Fiscal Year 2020 Annual Report," USDA Miscellaneous 313475, United States Department of Agriculture.
    3. Coleman-Jensen, Alisha & Rabbitt, Matthew P & Gregory, Christian A & Singh, Anita, 2021. "Household Food Security in the United States in 2020," Economic Research Report 327186, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    4. Kathryn M. Cardarelli & Emily DeWitt & Rachel Gillespie & Rachel H. Graham & Heather Norman-Burgdolf & Janet T. Mullins, 2021. "Policy Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Insecurity in Rural America: Evidence from Appalachia," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(23), pages 1-13, December.
    5. Sharon Raszap Skorbiansky & Suzanne Thornsbury & Anne Effland, 2022. "Specialty crops and the farm bill," Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 44(3), pages 1241-1260, September.
    6. Toossi, Saied, 2021. "COVID-19 Working Paper: Filling the Pandemic Meal Gap: Disruptions to Child Nutrition Programs and Expansion of Free Meal Sites in the Early Months of the Pandemic," Administrative Publications 327342, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    7. Miriam Manboard & Cassandra M. Johnson & Hannah Thornton & Lesli Biediger-Friedman, 2021. "The HOME Study: Understanding How College Students at a Hispanic Serving Institution Coped with Food Insecurity in a Pandemic," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(21), pages 1-14, October.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:usdami:310389. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.usda.gov .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.