Food Insecurity and the Accumulation of Material Hardship: Evidence from the CPS, SIPP, and PSID

Food insecurity is widely used to identify vulnerable households, yet the literature remains divided over what exactly it captures. One perspective treats food insecurity as a proxy for economic disadvantage—a view supported by cross-sectional associations but complicated by recent causal evidence. A second perspective contends that food insecurity reflects subjective perceptions of hardship rather than objective economic deprivation, but empirical evidence on this hypothesis is limited. A third perspective emphasizes that food insecurity primarily depends on household experiences of other forms of hardship. Using longitudinal data from three nationally representative surveys, this study adjudicates between these perspectives by examining how food insecurity changes within households as economic resources, subjective wellbeing, and material hardship change over time. I find that food insecurity is highly stable within households over time and is only weakly responsive to changes in economic resources and subjective wellbeing. By contrast, food insecurity increases when households experience other direct forms of hardship, including worsening housing conditions and greater difficulty paying bills. These findings challenge the idea that households substitute one form of hardship for another when navigating scarcity. Instead, food insecurity appears to coincide with other forms of material hardship: households experiencing hardship in one domain are often exposed to hardship in others.