To meet the rising need for food and nutrition assistance during the pandemic in the United States, all states were approved to provide Emergency Allotments (EA) to households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In this analysis, we use the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Surveys and exploit staggered state-level variation in dissolution of the SNAP EA payments to study whether the end of EA is associated with food-related challenges and economic hardships. Our findings indicate that EA termination is followed by a decrease in the likelihood that adult survey respondents had sufficient food for consumption and an increase in the probability of experiencing difficulty in paying meeting with usual household expenses. These findings provide policy-relevant insights into the potential impact of the nationwide termination of the EA payments that came into effect in early 2023.

This study examines the relationship between state cyberbullying laws (which require schools to enact effective guidelines to address cyberbullying) and the reporting behavior of youth. The analysis utilizes nationally representative samples of high-school adolescents from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys and incorporates state-time variation in the implementation of cyberbullying laws in a difference-in-differences framework. Key results indicate that adoption of a cyberbullying law is related to statistically significant increases in the likelihood that students report experiences of being victimized by electronic bullying as well as various forms physical bullying at school. Further empirical analyses signal that the increase in students’ reporting of victimization experiences is likely to be driven by the laws’ intended increase in victims’ reporting rather than by a potential rise in incidence of cyberbullying (and school violence) in the post-implementation period. The regression estimates are robust to the inclusion of multiple sensitivity checks.