Three essays on the inequality of household food security
Date
2024
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Abstract
This 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.
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Subject
economic cycle
home meal production
instrumental variables
food security
dynamics
immigrant