Abstract:
An important part of the U.S. safety net, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides cash-like benefits to low-income people that can only be used to purchase food. My proposed project will investigate relationships between the timing of SNAP benefit receipt and children’s achievement test scores in North Carolina (NC), using a unique dataset I have created that links administrative data on student test scores from the NC Department of Public Instruction and data on SNAP receipt from the Department of Health and Human Services. Using this dataset, I will examine whether recency of SNAP benefit receipt affects children’s test scores, by comparing children who take tests at the beginning of their families’ monthly benefit cycle to children who take tests at the end of their families’ benefit cycle. Importantly, in NC, timing of benefit receipt within the month varies randomly by household based only on the last digit of the recipient’s social security number. My project relates strongly to the Center’s core research theme of “Children and the intergenerational transmission of poverty.” My unique contribution will be findings with implications for inequality between low-income and higher-income children. Standardized test scores provide information on children’s cognitive functioning. If children have poorer test performance at the end of families’ SNAP benefit months, this implies that for a portion of each month, children in SNAP-receiving families operate with reduced cognitive functioning. Even if, for example, cognition is only affected for three days per month, over the course of a school year, these experiences will accumulate as a 10% decline in the share of schooling for which SNAP-receiving children are fully attentive relative to their higher-income peers. This design will identify the extent to which such accumulation over the school year may account for the test score gap between low-income and higher-income children.

Abstract:
Latinos are America’s largest minority group, now comprising 17% of the population. Their proportion of the population is expected to double in less than three decades. Latinos’ relatively low levels of educational attainment over the generations have led scholars, politicians, and laypersons to fear that they may not move into the middle and upper classes, but instead, experience stagnated or downward mobility over the generations where they become mired in poverty. Scholars are especially pessimistic about Latino mobility because Latino communities are viewed as lacking ethnic institutions and social capital that help to overcome safety net deficits in Asian communities and that can guard against policy failures and institutionalized racism in urban education. This research bridges two of CPR’s thematic areas: 1) the nontraditional safety-net, and immigration and poverty, by exploring whether Latino elites use their wealth and resources by engaging in ethnic philanthropy to create institutions (i.e. Latino banks, health clinics, Latino schools, job creation programs) that fill resource gaps in immigrant communities. This research is the first to examine whether Latino elites act as safety net agents in poor Latino communities and is important for policy makers devising innovative policies that redefine, and overcome cutbacks, in the social safety net. Ethnic philanthropy is not typically viewed as a segment of the safety net, but programs and institutions spearheaded by ethnic elites may prove crucial in stabilizing the economic well being of poor Latinos in immigrant communities.