Rules of Thumb for Producing Food Stamp Program Impact Estimates

Excerpts from the Executive Summary: The Food Stamp Program (FSP) provided assistance to one in 10 Americans each month in 1995. Given the FSP's large caseload and costs, which exceeded $24 billion in 1995, policymakers and program administrators continually evaluate the program, proposing changes to its eligibility criteria and benefit structure that are intended to make it more effective. To make informed decisions about food stamp policy, policymakers rely on information from the Food and Consumer Service's Office of Analysis and Evaluation (OAE), which develops estimates of the net impact of proposed reforms on FSP costs. OAE relies primarily on microsimulation models to produce these estimates; however, when the immediate need for these estimates preclude the use of microsimulation models, OAE relies on "rules of thumb". Rules of thumb are essentially estimates of the change in food stamp benefits resulting from a change in an FSP parameter or a change in a program that interacts with the FSP. The rules are based on estimates from microsimulation models as well as program and survey data. In this report, we present updated and improved rules of thumb for estimating the effects on the FSP of changes to (1) the FSP itself and (2) other public assistance programs that interact with the FSP.