are robust across specifications. These effect estimates show meaningful increases in mild food insecurity. Considering a baseline mean of 0.61, in columns (5) and (6), our estimates show that the coronavirus pandemic increased mild food insecurity in Bamako by 16 percent relative to the rest of Mali.

Panel C of Table 1 reports results using a dichotomous dependent variable indicating “moderate food insecurity” defined as equal to one of the raw FIES score is greater than three (Smith _et al._ , 2017). Although columns (1) and (2) show no evidence of an increasing time trend of moderate food insecurity in Mali associated with the pandemic, our difference-in-difference estimates in columns (3) and (4) highlight that in urban areas moderate food insecurity increased by 8 percentage points more than in rural areas. This represents a 33 percent increase in moderate food insecurity in urban areas relative to rural areas. These results represent the strongest estimates in this paper. This is important because existing research using the FIES across a variety of contexts consider this measure of “moderate food insecurity” as the primary measure of food insecurity (Smith _et al._ , 2017). This measure, which identifies “moderate food insecurity” if a household responds affirmatively to at least three out of the eight FIES questions, more accurately represents the multidimensional reality of experienced food insecurity for households. Finally, we find qualitatively similar results on average in columns (5) and (6), when considering differences between Bamako and the rest of Mali, though these effects are less precisely estimated.

Finally, Panel D of Table 1 reports the results using a dichotomous dependent variable indicating “severe food insecurity” defined as equal to one if the raw FIES score is greater than seven (Smith _et al._ , 2017). This definition therefore requires that households have indicated affirmative responses on all eight of the FIES questions and is commonly associated with individuals experiencing physiological hunger (Nord, 2014). Perhaps unsurprisingly, due to the relative infrequency of this extreme level of food insecurity, these estimates suffer from low statistical power. We estimate effects with substantial magnitudes but that remain statistically indistinguishable from a null result. Specifically, severe food insecurity increased by roughly 60 percent in urban areas relative to rural areas. Therefore, the results reported in Panel D of Table 1 should be interpreted with extreme caution. Severe food insecurity remains relatively uncommon in Mali, experienced by roughly 3 percent of the population prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

Existing predictions, based on modeling the expected changes to income, prices, and food supply, suggest that the coronavirus pandemic may increase the number of undernourished people in the world by between 10 and 16 percent in 2020 (Baqueano _et al._ , 2020; FAO _et al._ , 2020). Our estimates suggest that these aggregate global estimates may hide important heterogeneity. In the context of urban Mali the short-term effect of the coronavirus pandemic on mild food insecurity is _at least_ as large as the average global effect and likely larger. Heterogeneity also exists in the level of severity of food insecurity. In urban Mali we find that the pandemic increased “moderate food insecurity” by at least 33 percent. This is an important finding for at least two reasons. First, existing research uses this “moderate food insecurity” measure as the primary measure of experienced food insecurity globally (Smith _et al._ , 2017). Second, this estimate is substantially larger than existing predictions of the effect of the pandemic globally (Baqueano 14