participation rates and market power, consistent with our results on heterogeneity.

First, this paper contributes to an extensive literature that evaluates the impacts of SNAP. Recent papers regarding SNAP (Hoynes and Schanzenbach, 2009; Almond et al., 2010; Hoynes et al., 2016) exploit the county-level rollout of the program in the 1970s as a quasi-experiment to evaluate the impact of SNAP on consumption, birth weights, and long-run measures of human development. Furthermore, a growing number of studies have estimated the MPCF out of SNAP benefits. Hastings and Shapiro (2018) (hereafter HS) use transaction-level data from a large US grocery retailer’s operations in five states to estimate an MPCF out of SNAP of 0.5 to 0.6 but an MPCF out of cash of 0.1. Based on these estimates and other evidence, they reject the fungibility of SNAP benefits.<sup>7</sup> Hoynes and Schanzenbach (2016) provide a review of the literature.

The supply-side responses of retailers have received less attention. A number of recent papers have investigated cross-state variation in within-month issuance schedules to investigate how quickly consumers exhaust their benefits upon receipt, and whether retail stores take advantage of these predictable expenditure phases (Hastings and Washington 2010; Goldin et al. 2022). Jaravel (2018) studies relationships between SNAP take-up rates, prices, and product variety using consumer scanner data.<sup>8</sup> We utilize a novel source of variation to study the incidence of a persistent increase in SNAP benefits.

Second, this paper contributes to a literature studying the incidence of social programs through their impacts on prices. Cunha et al. (2019) study a village-level randomized experiment in Mexico and find that in-kind transfers of food decrease prices due to increases in supply, whereas equivalently valued cash transfers have a negligible impact on prices. Filmer et al. (2018) analyze a randomized evaluation of a Philippine cash transfer program and show prices of perishable protein-rich foods rose as a result of the transfers, leading to a negative impact on the nutrition of non-beneficiary children. Banerjee et al. (2021) study an experiment in Indonesia that randomized rice vouchers versus rice deliveries across districts. They find that the former intervention led to higher transfers due to lower leakages; while they do not explicitly calculate price incidence and their household-survey-based price difference is imprecise, our back-of-the-envelope calculation based on their numbers suggest a price incidence of 0.16%, comparable in order of magnitude to our finding for the US context. A literature on the price effect of minimum wages also exists.<sup>9</sup> Village-level transfers directly

> 7Other work includes Beatty and Tuttle (2015), who report an MPCF of 0.484 estimated using the Consumer Expenditure Survey data and the matching-on-observables method, comparing food expenditure patterns of SNAP-recipient and non-SNAP recipient households before and after the 2009 ARRA.

> 8We lay out the main differences between our papers in Appendix Section A.

> 9Aaronson et al. (2008) provide evidence for complete labor-cost pass-through in restaurants. Leung (2021) suggests that in addition to the cost channel, changes in product demand could further increase prices under variable markups while Renkin et al. (2020) highlights the effects on the costs of both manufacturers

4