The authors evaluate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. They do so by bounding the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) of the program on the population of eligible children. They evaluate SNAP this way with respect to food insecurity, obesity, anemia and subjective health.
The paper has a theoretical and an empirical contribution. The theoretical contribution is that it extends the literature on partial identification bounding methods to account for misreporting (in addition to selection) and derive bounds on the ATE under different sets of assumptions in this setting. The empirical contribution is that the authors apply these bounds to SNAP using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and show that the derived bounds can be informative.
The authors find evidence that SNAP improves the health outcomes of eligible children. For anemia and subjective health the bounds point at substantial health improvements due to SNAP and rule out even small deteriorations in health. For obesity and food insecurity this is only the case after excluding the possibility of false positive reports of SNAP participation.