 Welcome everyone and good afternoon. I'm Susan Collins, the John and Sanford Weill, Dean here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you here today on behalf of both the Ford School and our new Center for Public Policy in Diverse Societies. And I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to our speaker, Professor Ibonia Washington. Ibonia is the Henry Cohen Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. She received her PhD in Economics from MIT in 2003 with specializations in public finance and political economy and research interests in the interplay of race, gender and political representation, the behavioral motivations and consequences of political participation, and the processes through which low-income Americans meet their financial needs. And as you know, her talk this afternoon will focus on very important and timely issues related to food purchasing and the design of social safety nets. Ibonia's research is highly interdisciplinary and in fact while in Ann Arbor this week she will be meeting with faculty and students from the Economics Department and the Department of Political Science in addition to those of us here at the Ford School and we're very grateful to her for her time. Today's event is the first in a series of distinguished lectures to be hosted by the Diversity Center this year. And I'd like to take just a moment to say a word or two about the Center. We opened our doors last year as a first of its kind initiative designed to shed light on how public policy can most effectively navigate opportunities as well as challenges that arise as our societies become increasingly diverse locally, nationally and locally. We have a number of additional public events that are planned for the fall and you can learn more about them on our website along with information about our research and educational programming and activities that the Center has funded over the past year. And with that it is a great pleasure to welcome Ibonia Washington to the podium. Okay, so thank you so much for inviting me and I need to say first off research is generally of course a very solitary profession but this research piece of research that I'll speak to you about today is joint work with my colleague, Justine Hastings. Now we already have a pretty long title up there first of the month, grocers, shoppers and purchasing power but actually I'm going to make it even a little bit longer by saying grocers, low income shoppers and purchasing power. To be clear that we were talking about low income shoppers in particular people who qualify for government benefits, food stamps and cash welfare. Okay, so I know that you've had to talk recently about a year ago maybe about low income neighborhoods that do not have access to grocery stores. So we're talking about now low income neighborhoods that do have access to grocery stores but still trying to understand what the purchasing patterns of the people at these grocery stores look like how the store pricing is at these grocery stores to think about policies where we can even continue to improve people's welfare. I mean getting a grocery store is a big step but then there's still other policy initiatives to be taken. Okay, so in particular the questions that I will address today what do benefit recipients buy at the grocery store? This is very interesting because one of the criticisms of low income people in particular is that well they're not buying food that's as nutritious as middle income or higher income people are and then one response to that as well that's because of what's available in neighborhoods. So now we can take a look at a neighborhood that does have a huge grocery store and ask this question what do benefit recipients buy when they do have a grocery store. Secondly we'll look at when benefit recipients buy at the grocery store. Exactly when are they in the store buying the things that they buy and finally how does the store pricing respond to their patterns of shopping. And for all these questions we'll want to look at the implications for both health and economic policy. So let me be very clear about the context that we're talking about. Unfortunately I don't have local data I have great data that I'm very excited about in that I have access to the scanner data from a large grocery store chain that operates nationally and so we have two years worth of scanner data from three stores in Nevada. Three different stores with different neighborhoods that are all low income neighborhoods but you can see more and less disadvantaged. So store one about 14% of the purchases made at that store are purchases by households that receive government benefits. In store two that figure is 26% and store three you can see that's from the most impoverished neighborhood 45%. And again just to understand the context we're talking about poor urban neighborhoods heavily Latino neighborhoods and so to give you some demographics high school graduation rates also in these neighborhoods. And some background on the benefits that I keep saying benefit recipients so let me be specific about the benefits that I'm talking about. First off food stamps right so I imagine many of you are familiar it's a federal means tested program that provides a currency that can only be used to purchase food for home preparation. So to make that concrete you go to your local store your local grocery store I imagine there is I passed a huge whole foods as I came in here so it looked like you would have a lot of stuff in there so you go to the deli counter and you ask for prepared sandwich that could not be paid for with food stamps right but if you walk through the aisles and grab your own bread, mayonnaise, tomatoes, ham then that could be paid for with food stamps just so we understand the difference and I'm saying food stamps and I think people still do say food stamps but obviously that's a bit of archaic language because no one is walking around with stamps anymore everyone has electronic cards right and secondly cash welfare and again we've had big changes in terminology in this in the last 10 years or so and so of course the program used to be called AFTC nationally and now it's administered state by state and so there's going to be a different name state by state but I think folks understand what I'm talking about talking about means tested program that provide cash to low income families primarily low income families with children and as is the case in Nevada like in many probably all states in the United States now all of these benefits are delivered on electronic cards that look just like a debit card in Nevada the benefits are delivered electronically both of these programs on the first of the month and basically these benefits do not expire if you don't use your card for something like 9 months then you might have trouble using it but once you understand that you don't have to rush on the last day of the month to use up what you were getting so the data that I'm excited about come from the skin of the grocery store machine of the grocery store of the check app so it's the data that are collected when you make your purchase so say you're buying an apple we would know that you bought one apple we would know the weight of the apple the price per weight therefore can compute from there your total price how you paid so maybe you paid with cash maybe you paid with a credit card maybe you paid with one of these benefit cards right and coupled with your loyalty ID card so you know now many of these grocery stores have if you want to get any discounts you have to swipe your loyalty card so we observe you we know who you are every time you come in because you're swiping that loyalty card and so then we can identify benefit recipients as those folks who ever pay throughout the month with their benefit card is that clear then let's get into the meat of things what do benefit recipients buy and again this is interesting because we know that there are difference between what low income people eat and what people with higher income eat but part of that we understand to be because of a lack of access so what happens when there is the access when it's on when you have these grocery stores on well traveled bus lines and people can get to these stores alright so let's look at that so across our three stores benefit recipients purchase 29% of the products or my 29% of the purchases in dollars so that's that orange line across is there at that 29% and then I've just taken I've just highlighted for you a few different goods and so you can see that if the bar is below the 29% then the benefit recipients are purchasing less than their fair share if you will and if it's higher then they're purchasing more alright so let's look at the different goods so the first two I have here are alcohol and tobacco right and so I think it's important to point out that in terms of what purchasing in the store benefit recipients are much less likely to purchase alcohol right then the non-benefit recipients relative to their size and tobacco it's about even they're purchasing about the amount that they're representing in the store yes absolutely not yes I can and I recognize them even if they come in one time and do not use their benefits at all at the end of the month perhaps they have no benefits left but because of that loyalty card that they needed to swipe for the discounts I know it's the same family okay and what's nice again I said for the scanner data you can see things very much in detail and so what would happen if I want to come in and I want to buy the meat to make a deli sandwich make a sandwich for my children but I also want to buy a pack of cigarettes in my data I would see very clearly that I paid for the one with food stamps and I paid for the other with cash or credit card I'm sorry I did not hear you right so obviously we're only talking here about people who have the loyalty cards and so what we do is we take out the I mean everyone is swiped with a loyalty card of course but perhaps they're using the cashier's loyalty card or something like that right so we take out those purchases which seem to all you know all be done by the same one did you all okay right so that we can't add up for the non-benefit recipients right we don't know what the total is supposed to be but we do have a sense that the benefit recipients are purchasing are spending a large share at the grocery store and in fact we do all of our analyses limiting to folks that we actually see in the beginning and at the end of the month and get similar similar results running across the 29% line and I just mean to mark the fact that benefit recipients make 29% of purchases overall right and so if they made if benefit recipients and non-benefit recipients purchased everything equally then all those black bars would hit that orange line right to the extent that they're under that means that benefit recipients are purchasing less relative to non-benefit recipients and to the extent that they're over benefit recipients are purchasing more of that good relative to non-benefit recipients is that clear great okay so I think we have an idea of how they to work the graph so then I just picked out some other categories to give us a sense alright so this is candy and it's a little bit above benefit recipients purchasing a little bit more as is true for meat and salty snacks okay so benefit recipients purchasing a little bit more of these things than non-benefit recipients relative to their share but in the last three bars I want to hone in on the goods that people are really really concerned with or that people talk about when they talk about this issue and that's fresh produce okay fresh produce is this one right here and so what we can see is right there's the people say well low income people don't don't eat enough fresh fruit, don't eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables well but that's because there aren't fresh fruits and vegetables in the low income neighborhoods and so you can see here even in the store that has fresh produce right you see the benefit recipients purchasing less than their fair share if you will right but you can ask well to what extent is that made up by frozen okay I'm not trying to say that it's just as healthy and we're still eating fruits and vegetables alright so here's frozen fruit not at all much less than the fair share and there's frozen vegetables okay the frozen vegetables are in sense compensating for the lack of the of the fresh vegetables okay so any questions about this I'm just trying to look purely descriptive at the purchasing patterns yes I'm to live and basically using that low income people that have benefits versus low income people can eat enough exactly or not using them for well there actually is some income variation in ours but the point is well taken that you might want to see this graph with just quarter quarter one, quartile one of income versus quartile four if we think that's the correct benchmark the people who are not on benefits though overall do actually have more money than the folks here I mean some people qualify for benefits and don't take them so there's that as well so what do benefit recipients buy? well even with the access to the grocery store we see that there are differences in the purchasing patterns benefit recipients are purchasing fewer fresh fruits and vegetables at least if we just stick to talking about fresh right and so the policy implication here is there might be a greater role for things like double food stamps right so in neighborhoods where there is no grocery store at all and if we and the government wants to encourage low income folks to eat fruits and vegetables like very near to where I live then there are farmers markets that provide the fresh fruits and vegetables and then the government will often say you can use your food stamps at these farmers markets that's one step or even more you get two for one at the farmers markets with your food stamps okay right so you use a dollar worth of food stamps you get two dollars worth of fruits and vegetables and the idea is to incentivize people to buy these fresh fruits and vegetables and we need this incentive because folks have to make two trips in this right they have to go to this farmers farmers market the fruits and vegetables but this suggests there might be a role for these things even in neighborhoods in which there are grocery store a role for some kind of incentive program even in areas where there are actually grocery stores and in fact states like California were thinking of doing pilot programs to that effect but these ideas came about largely as the recession was coming about so I haven't seen one that went all the way through and really provided some nice data but maybe people will go back to that idea there was a question back oh wow okay great alright so let's move on and think about when are benefit recipients buying their food and when are they in the store here I'm showing you actually in that last slide remember I picked out say five or six categories here I'm showing you half the categories in the store and for each category I have two bars okay so the first red blue is alcoholic beverages the second red blue is candy government's so for each category I'm showing you two bars the first bar is the fraction of purchases that benefit recipients do of that product in the first two weeks of the month remember they get the money on the first day of the month and the second bar is the purchases in the second two weeks so I'm showing you half the categories in the store and what I hope you notice immediately is the red bar is always higher than the blue bar to its right okay so it's red bar red blue red blue pairing so it always starts with the red is always higher than the blue to its right in some cases there's a big difference some cases like alcohol the first one there's a very small difference but there's always a larger share of the purchases being done by benefit recipients in the first half of the month and I'll show you the second half of the graph the pattern continues okay so the answer to the question of when are benefit recipients purchasing okay is that they're purchasing more in the beginning of the month more when they first receive their benefits and here's a graph we can think about looking week by week so each of those bars is a week the darker bars the darkest bar is week one week two week three week four and if we think about what you purchase in week one as being you know a hundred percent you're full what you would purchase you know in full okay then we can look and see in week two relative to to week one you're purchasing about 80% of what you're purchasing in week one okay and in week three that falls to about 74% and week four to 70% right so they're purchasing less as the month goes on okay now that's the not the same pattern as non-benefit recipients okay here are the non-benefit recipients here you see there's hardly any difference between week one week two week three week four okay fine but why is that at all interesting I could go to the store and I could buy all my food in the beginning of the month and I could buy things like sardines and crackers and things that I could eat all the way through the month and so who cares that I did all my shopping I like going to Costco you know that's fine so let's look at this by exactly that difference goods that you can store and that if you bought in week one would still be edible for you to eat in week four versus things that are perishable like milk and other dairy products and meat that if you bought in the first day of the month you wouldn't want to be eating in the last day of the month right so these first four bars are what you saw before for benefit recipients just for comparison and then here are the storeable goods we see that same kind of drop but we don't care because you could buy that at the beginning of the month and you could still be eating at the end of the month we're not concerned but we also see that pattern in the perishables we also see that pattern in the perishables you're buying fewer of things like milk and cheese for the end of the month so we know that you're eating less of those things and so this corroborates evidence that we've gotten from diary studies where you go to people's houses and you actually ask them to write down everything that they've eaten that people on benefits are buying and eating if we look at their food diaries less at the end of the month than they are at the beginning of the month I'm just curious how is it possible that both storeable and perishables drop by less from the first to the fourth than all? is there another category that's included in all that's not there's two other we did treats and also taking alcohol and tobacco separately and in fact I'll show you it's not the alcohol and tobacco there's the alcohol and tobacco one there's not a lot of change if they're addictive things we wouldn't necessarily expect that I'm just trying to show you so then it's interesting to ask we know that they're eating less at the end of the month buying and eating less at the end of the month we know this from we can see this in our grocery store data which corroborates things that we have seen in people's food diaries which gives us more confidence that they're shopping at the same places in the beginning at the end of the month because the stuff is matching what we see in food diaries but another question we could ask is does what benefit recipients buy change throughout the month if you know you're not quite going to make it buying the same thing to the end of the month are you substituting away are you eating I'm going to exaggerate here steak at the beginning of the month spam at the end of the month is that what's going on in fact we don't see that here so this is the overall results that you saw before I'm calling that quantity now because we're just talking about the quantity of food and then on the last two columns the last two sets of four bars I'm talking about the quality of the food and we have several measures in the paper but here I've pulled out two quality indices one is just using the grocery stores labeling there are certain products that are labeled premium and so we can see if the share of premium products changes throughout the month and we find that that's not the case we don't see that substitution to less quality to lower quality goods the second set of four bars the second quality index I'm showing you here is looking at what are the folks the highest income folks what are they purchasing and how much or what the benefit recipients look like does it look like what the high income people are buying and the extent to which it does it doesn't all that much but the extent to which it does does not change throughout the month what classifies high income or is that just those non-benefit recipients yes the question was what classifies them as high income to put them into this graph so probably your grocery store does this too they collect information on you for the loyalty card you need to fill out some information about your address and so forth and so on and so what the grocery store will do is to try to understand more about their patrons so they'll subscribe to data services that will give them ideas of what magazines people are subscribing to try to guess at what their political affiliations are and things like that and the income they estimate just based on where you live right then they can figure out what the census average income is in that area and so that's how we get there okay and so I'm talking about the people in the top quartile of that other questions okay yes that's interesting because I don't see I don't observe the zip code but rather the information that comes from the zip code so that I don't know I guess one way to look at that is to see how many people have the exact same thing you could back out how many different codes you actually have they absolutely could but that would answer the very question at least how many individuals other questions so we looked at when benefit recipients are purchasing and we find that purchasing and eating greater quantities of food at the beginning of the month than at month's end right and certainly doesn't seem to be due to some kind of taste for variety we see you're eating the exact same thing just kind of running short right and so the policy implication here is something that benefit recipients have actually asked for when they've been surveyed can we change the frequency of the delivery of the benefits okay and 10 years ago we would have said well but that has some kind of cost but now that they're electronic not really right you could split up the benefits and give people half on the first and half on the 15th if they're having trouble making it stretch because having money available to you means a neighbor can ask you to borrow it or what to get around those types of issues okay so more support for that idea which again as I said interviews is something that benefit recipients have said that they want alright so now let's look at the pricing and that's what I'm really excited about here I see but let me just finish my thought this is what I'm really excited about here because you know as I said previous work has looked at survey data and asked people to write down what they're eating every day but what's been missing from this analysis is a look at the prices right you might think well people shop at the we know everyone shops at the beginning of the month amongst benefit recipients and maybe the stores are really competing on those goods that benefit recipients are buying and so maybe you know it's all reinforcing yes so I was just going to comment that based on the interviews that people seem to want to change in the frequency that they're basically eating we have difficulty doing kind of discounting essentially we can't figure out how to budget our money over the course of the month is that consistent? that is one consistent story but I think the story that people tell more frequently is it's hard to say no to people when you have access hard to say no to other people in need and if you absolutely just didn't have money you wouldn't have to lend it to other people that's part of the story right okay so how do prices respond and here we see again using the same set of bars the quantity change which you keep seeing is on the left and the price change is on the right so the first thing to note is that the price doesn't change all that much the price doesn't change all that much but the second thing to note is that it does change in the time that the Europeans are buying the most the prices are the highest the change is about 3% where it was 30 something percent over here okay is this the competing for the customers? right oh absolutely so when I moved to to move from all this beautiful data to my anecdote which we often like to do when I first moved to New Haven of course I didn't know the food stamps came out I guess I should have looked that up so I got to the store one day and it was packed and so it was packed and I'm waiting in line all this time and the woman in front of me turns to me and she said don't you just hate the way they raise the prices on the data food stamps come out so absolutely if you lived in the neighborhood you wouldn't think that yes you mean with the discount card? are you registering the data or is this the actual sticker price? because if benefit recipients have cards less at a less percentage than everyone everybody has a card here okay this is still what everybody has a card so everyone has access to the discounts both the benefit recipients and the non-benefit recipients but that still is actually the question are these the hosted prices these are the actual prices remember that the data are coming and it's scanned so if in the first week the same product has no discount but in the second week it's 10% off then that would register as a drop in price on this graph right there aren't different prices for benefit recipients and non-benefit recipients so you're aggregating up to everybody all purchases during the month are looking at them yes let me answer that more specifically in two graphs so remember that underlining this are three stores okay and let me just ask you to believe me that the behavior of the consumers at the three stores looks the same okay that this graph is a pretty fair representation of what benefit recipients are doing in store one store two and store three but from the grocer's point of view in store one they make up a smaller fraction of the customers and store three they make up a much larger share of the customers so let's look at what happens store by store now obviously I blew this up so that you could see the differences the differences are still small but I blew them up so you could see them relative to one another right so here's store one okay and you have the change in price you do see the drop one one and a half percent there has more benefit recipients shopping there right they're doing a larger share of the purchases and we can see that the difference in the price in week one and week four lots of benefit recipient shopping fewer benefit recipient shopping okay is is greater on store two okay and still greater in store three and in this graph what we've done is created a CPI consumer price index for those goods that benefit recipients buy okay so this is for those goods that benefit recipients buy what is the change in the price store by store yes it's a difference in price I mean it's how how you want to say it right you want to say the price is higher at the beginning of the month the price is lower at the end of the month yeah so it just I mean week five only has two or three days right but then yeah yeah and then yeah and then it's just it's just back I mean it's all the weeks aggregated together yeah right absolutely yeah absolutely absolutely so right this is just talking about the differences that's right in the initial levels not that I recall but I would have to look back at that to be sure other questions okay and another way to think about this further elaborating on your question about which items are we talking about right so here we see when benefit recipients are a larger share of your purchasing we see a larger difference suggesting that the store is actually responding to the behavior of the shoppers and we can see that another way by asking whether you're buying item by item right remember when I showed you red bar blue bar red bar blue bar we saw that for different items there was a different change in how much benefit recipients were buying at the beginning of the month and the end of the month right and we can graph that against the change in the price for each of those right so we can ask if there's a bigger drop off in how much is being bought is there a bigger drop off in terms of the price and sure enough that's what you see here so it's change in price graphed against change in quantity right and so what you should note here obviously you can't read those individual points is that if you were to graph a line through it it would have a positive slope okay how do prices respond right in the typical way that one would predict as an economist who weren't trying to think of a loss leader type of model prices for the goods that benefit recipients buy are higher at the beginning of the month when benefit recipients purchase larger quantities the implication here is a little bit different than the one that the benefit recipients were asking for if we don't want the store to be able to respond what we need to do is stagger the benefit delivery right what we need to do is say family A you get your benefits on the first and family B you get it on the second and family C on the third it could still be twice a month but let's make sure that all throughout the month benefit recipients are receiving their benefits now that's not perfect obviously the price could just settle at the highest point all throughout the month right and we don't have good evidence here because no state staggers a heck of a lot when it goes across the first 10 days the last digit of your social security number determines when you would get your food stamp benefits but nobody is really doing what I'm talking about trying to really smooth things across the month so I don't know for sure what price point we would see things settle at store by store yeah we don't find other cycling on the first of the month but there could be other people in here who are cycling at other times right who have a different cycle but right but we didn't see anything for the non-benefit recipients in this so maybe that a lot of people in Nevada get paid on the 15th and then we if we knew more context we would see that okay so right so it suggests there's a role for staggers benefit delivery it'd be great if some state tried that out and we could see what would happen okay so maybe some of the things I've said have been a little bit of a downer I don't know but let me end and say something positive about food stamps and cash benefits at least is related to the purchasing of food remember that's big quantity change there is a price change but it's not huge right there's a price change but it's not huge so what this suggests is the food stamp benefits are accruing to the food stamp recipients seems to be right so well of course food stamp benefits should accrue to food stamp recipients but of course that's not always the case let's take the case of the earned income tax credit right so this is our largest property program and with the earned income tax credit low income workers who work get back money for every hour that they work and the way the program generally works is nobody does the pay quarterly on this although it is an option nobody does that everybody waits until the end of the year gets their forms that they need to get and files for the EITC to get this money back it's a huge lump sum in February and March not after April 15 because people who are going to get money back file right away so it's more like February and March and people get a bunch of money back so what happens in low income neighborhoods when the earned income tax credit checks come out well one prices on cars and other appliances flat screen TVs are a lot higher and less refunds are issued so I was talking about small changes 36% change in quantity 3% change in price but these studies here have found large changes and so you can imagine you're getting $1,000 back and you were going to buy a flat screen TV for $500 if that flat screen TV now costs $1,000 $500 of this of this government program is being given to the guy who sells the flat screen TV Is this coming from the same enter data? No no this is other people's research this is not my research thank you they don't sell cars at this they sell a lot of stuff it's a big store it is a big store and I don't use all of their products but this is not mine so thank you for asking I'm not sure because it's not my research and I imagine people are looking as only as far as they thought that people who received these checks would be shopping so I'm not sure I'd have to let it and when else happens? well and this again is not my own paper this is Jesse Rothstein here that we see that wages are lower for low wage workers since its introduction so you imagine that $6 an hour the EITC is great it's going to give you an extra $2 an hour so you're going to then in the end be coming home with $10 an hour well not if your wage is reduced to $6 an hour not if it's reduced because your employer knows well you're going to be getting some of the money for the government and you're still going to get just as much and so this is an example of the benefit going to the employer than the employer so what's nice the positive policy note then to end on is that unlike the EITC with the food stamp benefits are accruing to the recipients seem to be accruing to the recipients unlike evidence we found recently not me personally for other income support programs alright so now let's open it up to more questions the focus has been on the low income areas I think it would be even more powerful if you could show that there's actually no evidence of that in high income grocery stores because all throughout your talk I kept thinking what's the benchmark here so how much are these people eating certain kinds of things relative to more middle income neighborhood I'm sure the data collection would be horrendous if that enough to do this but it would be particularly interesting to see how we actually did do what you said we have three stores in a neighborhood that has very low in neighborhoods that have very low shares of benefit recipients like 1, 2, 3% and so we don't see the price changes there we actually did have those data this was a Latino population do you think that this would hold true for an African American community in the South or a wide community in Appalachia where we know that dietary habits nutrition are different so you're talking about the fruit and vegetable result in particular do you think that the buying pattern would hold on would you look at different regions and different ethnic groups so the question is asking do I think the buying pattern would hold for different regions and ethnic groups but what I'm trying to ask back is are we talking about in terms of what they're buying or when they're buying what they're buying I would think when they're buying would stay I think when they're buying what they're buying would be different from region to region but when they're buying I would suspect that that doesn't change now if we were working in the South we would compare because the diet certainly is different other than the Southwest we would still want to compare the benefit recipients there to the non-benefit recipients there and you might still see the benefit recipients in the South then the non-benefit recipients in the South but we would want to control for the fact that Southerners eat a different diet absolutely so the question I don't know if everyone can hear it's just way in the back is proprietary data did I just ask for it and get it no no but you can apply for these data so you can try and see if they're willing to do it what you're describing the DITC versus the food stands in the satellite what was the pattern was that when a seller can identify clearly somebody who's got a benefit they can change the price of the response so the farm can identify whether the seller or their labor because they know their income they know whether they have the DITC and they cut their wages to the results in the case of the supermarket you can't identify to get benefits can you apply this to other programs and predict in which cases the beneficiary would capture most of the money versus somebody else that's interesting I thought you would have said health grants and colleges do you want to spin that example up for us this is interesting to think about let's do that and see if it works so for housing people with section 8 vouchers are easily identifiable so now let's look up if someone has a paper on that that's so great when you're off it's just write down 10 and see what we guess it is and then go to the public to finance literature and see if just that simple idea is enough to predict it it might not work fair enough so she's saying if you have money twice a month you're just going to be hit up twice a month for half as much the asker can also change behavior and I think that's right but I think what they're thinking is in the first of the month say you pay your rent and maybe some other bills will probably the main one is your rent and you buy a little bit of food and then you have money left over and there's some sense of paying yourself first you are going to take care of your rent you are going to take care of food if you have something left over then that's what you'll share so the idea would be I have nothing left over and then on the 15 maybe I have moved my electric bill and some other things there and I buy some food and then I don't have anything left to share but you're right it might not work other people can adjust their behavior your neighbor is going to adjust it even more quickly I see what you're doing even faster in terms of do you have information on the number of customers that were accountable so is it the same number of people throughout the entire month or are they also are the stores also seeing a lot more people at the very beginning of the month right so some people shop at the beginning of the month and don't come some benefit recipients shop at the beginning of the month and don't come back so you would see so you would observe a higher number of customers but I want to be clear because of the concern that well maybe I do my big shopping at the beginning of the month and I go to other stores at the end of the month that even if we talk about just the people who are there throughout the month those people are buying less when they come at the end of the month the increase in quantity as the month goes by because I'm not representative of the day you collected but I don't receive benefits from only one person but the way I see it is if I'm given a fixed number of dollars to spend per month I'm not going to spend 90% or whatever it is at the beginning of the month I leave myself nothing for the end I need something else right well I wasn't surprised in the sense that people had shown this before with survey data that it would show up so starkly in the grocery store data was a little bit of a was good to continue the rest of the project but I wasn't so shocked because I had heard that this is in fact what people do and when I moved to New Haven I saw that the line was out of the door and the woman kindly explained to me I mean in her complaint but she taught me a lot that that was not the day for me to go shopping this idea that people should eventually learn to kind of make this fixed amount of money last throughout the month and well how come does that happen so can you take these data and look at only people who have been on benefits for a year right so maybe it takes a while to understand exactly how far they're going to go and you still see that pattern and also one more thing sorry so the lady who said to you they increased prices so much in the beginning of the month so why wouldn't this lady be smart enough to buy a little now and then buy more a week from her no disrespect no I you need to prepare for a party and get it that day right so that's really what this I mean we've got to the crux of what this literature is asking about so and we see this in a lot to ask why do we see this cycling so you're asking some of the key questions well why don't people eventually learn to smooth and then we add our data that well actually the price is a little bit higher rather than helping resolve the puzzle right if we had seen that the prices were a little bit lower because they were doing some kind if they were really competing on a good that was a staple in the benefit recipients diet it was up well you know they're all shopping at the beginning of the month but they're also getting quite competitive prices so this explains it a little bit but our evidence as you point out makes the puzzle even more puzzling to say well why don't people start to learn to change I mean is it really liquidity constraints is it well we need to spend more on food because the more we spend today then tomorrow when the neighbor comes to ask me for stuff I don't have to give money you know it just makes the puzzle even more puzzling yes I had a question about when your policy implications you wanted to for every dollar with food stamps $2 could be used at like a fresh food yeah that's done actually in some places now where you did your research was there there was it was not there was not such a program a double food stamp program but there is one in Detroit from what I in Detroit at the but it's at the fruit and vegetable markets what I was suggesting is now if you're a neighborhood without a grocery store what I'm saying is just insulting but if for neighborhoods that have a grocery store do we see if we introduce such a program would we see people eating more nutritious food in those neighborhoods I was just saying let's at least try we haven't seen the program try in neighborhoods that already have grocery stores would the same type of program be a benefit in those types of neighborhoods posing the question I'm curious in the where your research is from was that supermarket chain the only chain present if there was more than one chain present might they be different with their pricing yes so she's asking what the competition was for the three stores one of the stores did not have any at one in one of the neighborhoods there's actually another large grocer another grocery but not so large so we run the gamut yeah that's it now I'm trying to remember of course I can't now she's asked that great question so I'll have to get back to you to the products and other things for other members of extended family maybe not their immediate household or neighbors or others and so it could actually be that what the immediate families eating is about the same in terms of the nutritional value of the government and so it has more to do with the community village than other things is there any work that suggests that the actual nutritional yeah so it's the food diaries from which we get that information for which we believe that people are actually eating less so there's paper by Jesse Shapiro fewer calories they translate into calories yeah and show that people are eating fewer calories in a paper by Jesse Shapiro let me put something just stop me when I get to the bars you're talking about this is that those bars come from these bars which were just every category in the store which the the grocer determined the categories quantities that unless I tell you their prices their quantities right and so to compare different so right so cereals easy as you just said you can just put everything into ounces and we do something similar for the fruit yeah we do it in ways isn't it unrepresentative that produce fresh produce is quantified as produce whereas frozen produce is split the fruits and vegetables is unrepresentative you know what I mean is that instead of saying you know it shows what percentage or how they compare to this 29% line I think what you're saying is wouldn't it be great if we had broken out the fresh produce into fresh fruits and fresh vegetables so we could make a better comparison yeah I mean they didn't come packaged to us like that but we could do that I know it is a fruit and it was a vegetable so I can go ahead and include it so they gave you this data these categories this is response to this question the categories I'm using are their categories yeah well I can read the description so please tell me she's asking for can I tell what's packaged what's in the package and what's not in the package we have decent descriptions of things so what was your suggestion that we do with that information I was just curious the descriptions are pretty detailed about things yeah you know sometimes a thing of oranges is already bundled into right or then sometimes they were from the loose bin and you picked them yourself yeah you could probably tell me as you presented this material to other individuals have you noticed sort of a preconceived notion on people's perceptions on this issue already as the data sort of breaks through some of that well you know so mostly I present to academics but then there was a conference at the Federal Reserve where I got to present to practitioners people who work in this area quite a bit and so they were not surprised one thing that they said is they were surprised that people thought that we the public would think that something would be all that much different when we move to electronic benefits so people thought well with electronic benefits you wouldn't be asked to help with others as much you wouldn't be able to sell your food stamps as much you know that's kind of what the government said is they were introducing these things and the practitioner said oh no there's ways there's still ways to steal them and there's still ways to use some for your neighbor and people have figured out ways around all these kind of things they're pretty much as liquid as the stamps don't be naive yeah I'm wondering to what extent the price response could be a result of people buying different things I imagine thinking about lettuce you can buy a head of lettuce or you can buy a plastic tub that has it already torn up and you can basically make it a salad right away I'm sure you pay a lot more per ounce and at the beginning of the month you're feeling flush you might buy the stuff that costs more per ounce and then would that show up as a price in your data so about that would show up the stuff that you just the fresh stuff that you were talking about that goes right into the salad that would show up in the difference on the quality index I think that stuff is already that would be something more like what a high income family would buy than something that where the low income family would buy so if we were seeing that kind of story we would expect to see changes in terms of quality over the month so that wouldn't show up as if the same family goes from high quality to low quality during the month the price would also go down presumably because high quality costs more in the low quality could your price drops through the month reflecting part of that shifting to lower quality as the month goes on it could but what I'm saying is it doesn't seem that people are actually shifting to lower quality right well about as much as your price it's actually smaller it's only about 1% and your price index is on fixed goods I mean your prices that you show dropping over the course of the month are that a box that's a fixed box of goods that costs 3% more than it does at the end of the month their lettuce costs right but I guess I wasn't clear thank you we actually did the price index two different ways one was looking at all the goods across the month so then they would all be accountable still be a fixed basket but we've also done let's just take the stuff that you buy in the first week and see what the price of that would be in the fourth week well I think it would be interesting to do more on the nutrition front to understand more about the changes in yeah so the quantities are changing throughout the month how is the nutritional content changing probably not a whole lot because we see the quality index does not seem to be changing that much so then, thinking about some of these interventions what can we do to encourage people to eat healthier so some of the things that I've mentioned before also the things that I mentioned if we could find a state that was doing there is one state that does staggering across say 20 some days if it would be interesting to look at data for that state if we could encourage a locality to do or someone else just to put up the money for the double food stamps would that make any difference so maybe not with these exact data I think now we need also some kind of intervention to see if something changed but one thing that you could look at just using this exact data is look in more detail about the nutritional content of the food which I very crudely coded the quality here but we could get into the different nutrients if we wanted to 26 months I'm just wondering if you have any families that go from having benefits to not having benefits if they use the same loyalty card it would be kind of interesting to see if they find different things when they are no longer eligible for benefits well we don't know eligibility but income is rough but we do see them stop using we could observe that they used them for 3 months and then they didn't use them for 3 months so we could certainly do it that way that would be kind of interesting in Michigan they are they are much more like you can't buy small apple juices you can only do large apple juices certain size their size limits to what could be used the card can be used for and I just wonder if people have more flexibility obviously once they are off benefits whether or not they buy same things or not particularly on those goods that aren't constrained those are the constraints that's interesting I think that must be a win if it's not too soon if you could go back to this state and get that free February 09 food stamp benefits went up 13.6% across the board so our data are pre so now we could get posted if you can continue this you can then see what right and we could also see if more is captured by the grocery store how much do food stamps cost the government annually I don't know this year 40 million people are getting food stamps what year did your data end I think sometime in 2008 when it was closer to 20 so there's been an enormous it's a huge program it's a big program when it's not a recession and it's a huge program during this recession do you know how much it costs annually I think it's something like $100 a month 40 million people times $1200 a year billions and billions it's great thinking we want to take one more question and then we'll wrap this up I was just wondering how the quality affects how is quality so there's a lot in the paper but the two that I'm doing here one is simply is it a premium food so the store labels things as premium better kind of meat with less fat they would label it as premium for that one either is or it isn't it is or it isn't generic is another way to do that kind of thing we get something similar and the second one is looking at those goods that the highest purchasing we actually do have a reception outside of the double board so we'd like to stay for an informal reception