Hungry for Success? SNAP Timing, High-Stakes Exam Performance, and College Attendance - NBER Working Paper 28386 - January 2021

Sep 14, 2026

Monthly government transfer programs generate consumption cycles aligned with when benefits are received. This paper leverages state-level differences in the staggered issuance timing of nutritional assistance benefits to study how monthly food availability cyclicality influences academic outcomes. Using individual-level scores from a large U.S. college admissions exam linked to national college enrollment records, the study finds that taking the exam during the last two weeks of the SNAP cycle lowers test performance and reduces 4-year college attendance among low-income high school students.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages52

Reading Time2 h 11 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Income inequality and nutritional inequality

Natural experiment in SNAP benefit timing

Matching SNAP schedules to SAT administration

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES HUNGRY FOR SUCCESS? SNAP TIMING, HIGH-STAKES EXAM PERFORMANCE, AND COLLEGE ATTENDANCE Timothy N. Bond Jillian B. Carr Analisa Packham Jonathan Smith Working Paper 28386 [http://www.nber.org/papers/w28386](http://www.nber.org/papers/w28386) NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 January 2021 We thank The College Board for providing data. We also thank Angela Boatman, Jason Cook, Chloe East, Brent Evans, Joshua Goodman, Nathaniel Hendren, Melissa Kearney, Matthew Notowidigdo; conference participants at the 2019 Allied Social Science Associations, Society of Labor Economists, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, Southern Economic Association meetings, and the 2020 NBER Children's Spring Meeting; and seminar participants at Miami University, Montana State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois, University of Alabama Birmingham, Florida State University, Peking University, West Virginia University, Vanderbilt University and Texas Tech University for helpful suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2021 by Timothy N. Bond, Jillian B. Carr, Analisa Packham, and Jonathan Smith. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Hungry for Success? SNAP Timing, High-Stakes Exam Performance, and College Attendance Timothy N. Bond, Jillian B. Carr, Analisa Packham, and Jonathan Smith NBER Working Paper No. 28386 January 2021 JEL No. I18,I2,I38,J18 ABSTRACT Monthly government transfer programs create cycles of consumption that track the timing of benefit receipt. In this paper, we exploit state-level variation in the staggered timing of nutritional assistance benefit issuance across households to analyze how this monthly cyclicality in food availability affects academic achievement. Using individual-level score data from a large national college admissions exam in the United States linked to national college enrollment data, we find that taking this high-stakes exam in the last two weeks of the SNAP benefit cycle reduces test scores and lowers the probability of attending a 4-year college for low-income high school students. Timothy N. Bond Department of Economics Krannert School of Management Purdue University 403 W. State Street West Lafayette, IN 47907 [tnbond@purdue.edu](tnbond@purdue.edu) Jillian B. Carr Department of Economics Krannert School of Management Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907 [carr56@purdue.edu](carr56@purdue.edu) Analisa Packham Department of Economics Vanderbilt University 2301 Vanderbilt Place Nashville, TN 37235 and NBER[analisa.packham@vanderbilt.edu](analisa.packham@vanderbilt.edu) Jonathan Smith Andrew Young School of Policy Studies P.O. Box 3992 Atlanta, GA 30302-3992 [jsmith500@gsu.edu](jsmith500@gsu.edu) 1 Introduction There is a strong link between income inequality and nutritional inequality. More than 35 percent of families under the federal poverty line are food insecure, compared to less than 10 percent for those with incomes more than three times the federal poverty line (Schanzenbach, Bauer, and Nantz, 2016) . This inequality extends to and perhaps perpetuates inequality in human capital accumulation. Low socioeconomic status (SES) students perform increasingly worse on achievement tests relative to their higher-income peers, exacerbating gaps in high-school completion and college attendance (Reardon, 2011) . In this paper we exploit a natural experiment in the timing of S

FAQs

What are the main findings for low-income students taking the exam?

Taking the exam in the last two weeks of the SNAP benefit cycle reduces test scores and lowers the probability of attending a 4-year college among low-income high school students.

Sep 14, 2026

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