Economic shocks, food insufficiency and mental health: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

March 12, 2026

Millions of Americans experienced a sudden loss of income along with hunger early in the COVID-19 outbreak. Using Household Pulse Survey data from April 23, 2020 to March 29, 2021, the authors found that the pandemic significantly impacted both food sufficiency and mental health, with food insufficiency having a larger negative impact on mental health […]

Publications

Household Hardship and Stimulus Payments during the Pandemic: Differences Across Ethnic Minorities in the United States

July 23, 2023

This study examines the impact of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Economic Impact Payments (EIP) on alleviating household hardship, primarily food insufficiency and expense difficulty, among ethnic groups in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS) from 2020-2022, the study investigates who received the […]

Publications

The Impact of COVID-19 on Racial Inequality in Diet Quality

July 23, 2023

Although a large and growing literature has investigated the diet and nutrition disparities (see Kozlova, 2016; Allcott et al., 2019 for earlier work), little research has analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on racial/ethnic disparities in diet quality. We complement the existing literature by providing causal estimates of how COVID-19 impacted the racial gaps in diet […]

Publications

An early assessment of COVID-19’s impact on tourism in U.S. counties

June 16, 2022

We use county-level data to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the tourism and hospitality sector, which was by far the most impacted of all sectors, focusing on employment and wage changes. Results support our hypothesis that rural counties experienced fewer negative impacts or even benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of job growth. We […]

Publications

Food Insufficiency and Twitter Emotions During a Pandemic

April 3, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic initially caused worldwide concerns about food insecurity. Tweets analyzed in real-time may help food assistance providers target food supplies to where they are most urgently needed. In this exploratory study, we use natural language processing to extract sentiments and emotions expressed in food security-related tweets early in the pandemic in U.S. states. […]

Publications

The Role of Community Food Services in Reducing U.S. Food Insufficiency in the COVID-19 Pandemic

October 1, 2021

We use state-level Census Household Pulse Survey data to examine the role of community foodservices such as food banks and pantries in reducing food insufficiency during the COVID-19pandemic in the United States. Food insufficiency increased for all income classes during thepandemic, and especially for the lower and middle classes. We adopt a fixed effects filteredestimator […]

Publications

The Conversation: More Americans couldn’t get enough to eat in 2020 – a change that hit the middle class hardest

September 23, 2021

Americans in households with annual incomes from $50,000 to $75,000 experienced the sharpest increase in food insufficiency when the COVID-19 pandemic began – meaning that many people in the middle class didn’t have enough to eat at some point within the previous seven days, according to our peer-reviewed study that will soon be published in the Journal of Agricultural […]

Publications

Rural Development Implications One Year After COVID

April 1, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching impacts on most sectors of the U.S. economy, and these impacts have been uneven across rural and urban areas. On the one hand, rural areas were already lagging behind urban areas in many sectors before the pandemic (Ajilore and Willingham, 2019; U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2018), including in terms […]

Publications

Google Searches Reveal Changing Consumer Food Sourcing in the COVID-19 Pandemic

May 21, 2020

In this commentary published in 2021, we examine how consumer interest changed since the advent of the pandemic, by observing Google search trends.

Tag: COVID-19