Browsing by Author "Berning, Joshua, advisor"
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Item Open Access Food insecurity among immigrant populations in the United States(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Norris, Caroline, author; Berning, Joshua, advisor; Cleary, Rebecca, committee member; Pena, Anita, committee memberAs households immigrate to the United States, abrupt environmental changes may impact household food security, health, and productivity. Persistent, cultural food preferences may affect a household's ability to achieve food security when removed from their country of origin, resulting in a higher incidence of food insecurity (FI) for immigrant households. Alternatively, a positive immigrant self-selection effect could result in healthy, wealthy, and highly motivated households deciding to immigrate, thus leading to a scenario where immigrant households are less likely to be food insecure than their native counterparts. Using a subsample of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement, this study compares food security levels between immigrant and non-immigrant populations in the United States across Chinese, Indian, Mexican, and African immigrant populations and across varying household compositions. To compare the food security status of particular immigrant groups with their respective native counterparts, we implement a coarsened exact matching (CEM) method to match households on various observable characteristics. Following CEM, we estimate a linear probability model for each subgroup of matched strata, with immigrant status acting as the variable of interest. Additionally, we employ an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to decompose differences in FI that are explained by mean native/immigrant differences in household characteristics and the relationship of those characteristics to FI. I find that immigrant populations vary greatly in FI incidence across both country of origin and household composition, and that the drivers of differential FI also varies between groups. For immigrants from Mexico and West Africa, immigrant status is associated with a 3.53% and 7.59% decrease in the likelihood of achieving household food security respectively. Conversely, for immigrants from India and China, immigrant status increases the likelihood of achieving food security, at 5.98% and 2.51% respectively. Among Mexican immigrants, differential characteristics are the primary driver of the gap of food security, namely differences in education and occupation endowments. For Chinese and West African immigrants, however, differential returns to characteristics are the primary drivers of the gap in food security.Item Open Access Three essays on the inequality of household food security(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Zhou, Siwen, author; Berning, Joshua, advisor; Bonanno, Alessandro, committee member; Bayham, Jude, committee member; Miller, Ray, committee memberThis dissertation contains three essays on the inequality of household food security in the United States. In particular, the second chapter examines the effect of economic cycle, particularly unemployment, on the likelihood of food insecurity for different immigrant households in the United States relative to native US households. As unemployment is not randomly determined for households, we create a Bartik instrument by exploiting exogenous variation in industry shares across locations interacted with national industry growth rates to identify the disproportional effect of unemployment rate on food insecurity for immigrant households. The third chapter examines how immigrant households use time and money to manage their household food security relative to natives. To overcome the potential measurement errors and endogeneity of household level time-use and expenditures, aggregated cell-level means of food production time and expenditures are employed as instruments separately to identify the causal effects of time and money inputs on household food insecurity and how these effects vary across immigrant and native households. The fourth chapter seeks to elucidate the long-term structural nature of food security dynamics through household financial asset holdings in United States. By adopting an econometric strategy, this chapter uses a 19-years panel dataset from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2001-2019) to establish the new the Structural Probability of Food Security (SPFS) measure for long-run study of food security dynamics.