Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

Pandemic EBT has the potential to be a powerful tool to fight food hardship among children when schools close for summer. But to realize its potential, states need to participate in the program and deliver benefits in a timely manner.

Lauren Bauer, Krista Ruffini, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach offer a preliminary analysis of the effect of the Pandemic EBT program on food hardship to date.

In this blog post, Lauren Bauer, Abigail Pitts, Krista Ruffini, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach find that Pandemic EBT reduced food hardship experienced by low-income families with children and lifted at least 2.7-3.9 million children out of hunger.

Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach detail policy responses tailored to the COVID-19 pandemic to support food security, particularly for households with children.

Slowdowns in the economy are inevitable. While it may be tempting to rely on Federal Reserve policy as a lone response to recessions, this would be a mistake; we know that fiscal stimulus is effective. Rather than wait for a crisis to strike before designing discretionary fiscal policy, we would be better served by preparing in advance. Enacting evidence-based automatic stabilizer proposals before the next recession will help the next recovery start faster, make job creation stronger, and restore confidence to businesses and households.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is both an effective antipoverty program and a natural automatic stabilizer, expanding when the economy is weak and contracting when it is strong. Hilary Hoynes of the University of California, Berkeley and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University present reforms to strengthen SNAP’s countercyclical effects.

Despite improvements across a number of economic indicators, rates of child experience of and exposure to food insecurity have failed to see reductions in the past three years. In this analysis, Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach explore the various ways children experience food insecurity, as well as its impacts nationwide from pre-recession to today.

This paper characterizes the types of individuals who would face work requirements in SNAP and Medicaid, describes what their work experiences are over a two-year period, and identifies the reasons why they are not working if they experience a period of unemployment or labor force nonparticipation. The analysis concludes that proposed work requirements would put at risk access to food assistance and health care for millions who are working, trying to work, or face barriers to working. 

Millions of Americans could lose their SNAP benefits if Congress adopts additional work requirements that mandate SNAP beneficiaries work at least 20 hours per week. Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach argue that work requirements will burden those already in the labor market, especially SNAP recipients who shift between full-time and part-time work due to labor market volatility.

To investigate the extent of exposure to additional work requirements for SNAP participants, we describe monthly employment stability and find considerable churn in the labor market across the 20 hours per week threshold proposed in the House Farm Bill. Over 16 months, between one in five and one in three adults 18-59 without young children at home could be exposed to sanction under the House work requirement proposal.

Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach provide an update on the state of food insecurity in the U.S., noting that despite economic growth across the country, food insecurity among households with children is still above its pre-recession level.

In this Hamilton Project strategy paper, Lauren Bauer,  Patrick Liu, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Jay Shambaugh articulate a framework for states as they oversee implementation of statewide accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act and describe how states differ in their approaches. The authors present novel analyses of the factors at the school and student levels that relate to chronic absenteeism and describe evidence-based strategies for schools as they work to reduce rates of chronic absence among students.