Heterogeneous effects of SNAP benefit enhancements on food sufficiency and mental health

For Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) households, the maximum benefit was temporarily increased by 15% from January through September 2021, with an April revision to Emergency Allotments (EA) raising benefits further for the lowest-net-income participants. We evaluate how the combined effects of these temporary benefit enhancements vary across households with different levels of susceptibility to food insufficiency, anxiety, and depression, as well as by household composition and geographic cost of living. Using data from the Household Pulse Survey, we first apply machine learning to predict households' susceptibility to each hardship outcome, then estimate treatment effects across the predicted susceptibility distribution using both traditional and doubly robust difference-in-differences estimators. The enhancements improved household food sufficiency by about 3%-4% on average. Gains tended to be larger among households with higher predicted susceptibility to food insufficiency and in lower-cost regions (e.g., 6%-7% in the Midwest), with smaller or null effects in higher-cost regions (e.g., the West). Across these dimensions, gains emerged largely after the April EA revision. We find no significant effects on anxiety over the January-September period in the full sample. In January-March, however, anxiety fell by about 3% across all households, driven by large reductions among those without children. Higher-cost regions also show anxiety reductions concentrated in this window. Depression shows no significant changes. We discuss implications for the design and targeting of SNAP benefit enhancements.