Flores-Lagunes paper on differential incidence and severity of food insecurity published in AER

Apr 30, 2018

The Differential Incidence and Severity of Food Insecurity by Racial, Ethnic, and Immigrant Groups over the Great Recession in the United States

Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Hugo B. Jales, Judith Liu & Norbert L. Wilson

American Economic Review, April 2018

Alfonso Flores-Lagunes

Hugo Jales

Economics Department

Center for Policy Research

Food Security

American Economic Review

Alfonso Flores-Lagunes

Hugo Jales

The authors document the differences in food insecurity incidence and severity by race/ethnicity and immigrant status over the Great Recession. They show that the disadvantaged groups with a higher incidence of food insecurity do not necessarily have a higher severity of food insecurity, which underscores the importance of examining both the extensive and intensive margins of food insecurity. Their decomposition analysis indicates that the contribution of compositional and structural factors to the observed differences in exposure to food insecurity is heterogeneous across these groups and over the Great Recession. Finally, SNAP does not seem to fundamentally change the patterns documented.