We thank SafeGraph, Inc. for making their data available for research. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

D espite a near continuous decline over the past 20 years, the teen birth rate in the United States continues to be 6 to 12 times that of other developed countries (Kearney and Levine 2012). Two types of economic arguments support the view that the high rate of teenage childbearing in the United States should be a focus of public policy. The first is based on the idea that teenagers are often not well-positioned to take care of children; as a result, teen childbearing disproportionately imposes costs on family, friends, communities, and public assistance programs. Unless teenagers fully internalize such costs when they make decisions, we would expect them to have children "too often" from a social welfare perspective. The second type of argument focuses on the costs that teenagers' choices impose on teens themselves. Although such arguments carry little weight where standard economic models of behavior can be applied, the extremely high rates of unintended pregnancies among sexually active teens-more than twice the rate of older women (Finer 2010)-suggest that homo economicus does not apply to teens making choices about sexual activities. It also suggests that policies aimed at reducing unintended pregnancies

In this paper, we study the effects of the timing of nutritional aid disbursement on crime, using two main sources of variation: (a) a policy change in Illinois that substantially increased the number of SNAP distribution days and (b) an existing Indiana policy that issues SNAP benefits by last name. We find that staggering SNAP benefits leads to large reductions in crime and theft at grocery stores by 17.5% and 20.9%, respectively. Findings also show that theft decreases in the second and third weeks following receipt but increases in the last week of the benefit cycle due to resource constraints.

We thank SafeGraph, Inc. for making their data available for research. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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