This dissertation consists of three chapters examining food security and the economics of teenage substance use.

My first chapter investigates the benefit spending behavior of households who participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the largest nutrition assistance program in the United States. I utilize a restricted administrative panel dataset to investigate several aspects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefit cycle and uncover potential unobserved heterogeneity. I find evidence supporting the existence of two types of SNAP households, which I denote as slow and fast spenders. Fast spenders comprise the majority of SNAP households, 77%, and spend approximately 70% of their benefit in the first week. In addition, fast spenders shop more frequently throughout the month, stay longer in the program, 3 years compared to 1 year and 4 months for slow spenders, and receive benefits that are almost twice as large, on average.

In my second chapter, I propose a novel Bayesian Graded Response Model (BGRM) for food security measurement. The BGRM produces continuous food security estimates and measures of estimation uncertainty at the household level. I utilize data from the 2017-18 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to estimate the BGRM for responses to the 10 adult core Food Security Module (FSM) questions. I find non-trivial uncertainty in household-level estimates, overlap in BGRM estimates across USDA-defined food security categories and significant within-category variation.

In my third chapter, I examine the effect of macroeconomic conditions on teenage marijuana, cigarette and alcohol use. Using data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, I find evidence of counter-cyclical teenage alcohol and cigarette use among females and 12 to 14 year olds. These results are consistent with evidence in the literature.