The first two chapters of this dissertation inform the design of effective public benefit programs in light of various information frictions and principal agent problems. The second and third chapter study how grocery retail supply impacts household welfare and nutrition. In my first chapter, I study how public sector managers impact both the quantity and quality of public service provision. I use novel administrative data containing case review decisions for three public benefit programs in the state of Texas: Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF. In this setting, managers oversee teams of caseworkers deciding whether to permit or deny household applications and can influence both the quantity of applications reviewed and the quality of decision-making. I document wide variation in quantity- and quality-based measures of performance across manager teams. I exploit variation in caseworker-manager assignments to show that managers explain 8-10% of the overall variation in caseworker performance. I find that higher manager quantity-based performance does not come at the cost of quality. Replacing managers in the lowest quartile of quantity-based performance with those at the 75th percentile would increase output by 5.6%, enough to eliminate the organization-wide case backlog that led to months-long delays in case review decisions. In my second chapter, I investigate the welfare implications of increased retailer participation in SNAP. Governments often rely on private vendors to distribute in-kind benefits. The types of vendors that participate can affect beneficiaries, local markets, and program costs. I study the effects of a dramatic increase in the number of non-traditional food stores– club, dollar, drug, and mass-merchandisers – accepting SNAP benefits during the Great Recession. These new authorizations reduced the proximity of SNAP recipients to SNAP-authorized retailers in both geographic and brand space. Newly-authorized retailers also increased their product variety, attracting market share of both SNAP andnon-SNAP shoppers from grocery stores. I do not find evidence this shift in the competitive retail landscape induced adjustments in retail prices. Nevertheless, I estimate that SNAP adoptions reduced aggregate shopping costs (inclusive of time) by an average of 7% for SNAP recipients and 2% for non-recipients. In the final chapter, I explore how household shopping trips, food expenditure, and nutrition are impacted by the entry of dollar stores. Dollar stores are a controversial and rapidly expanding food retailer with limited availability of perishable and nutritious food products. I use food retailer location data from Nielsen TDLinx and the Circana Consumer Panel dataset to document a large decrease in distance to the nearest dollar store relative to the nearest supermarket for households in our data. I also document that dollar store food expenditure is concentrated on less nutritious product groups and is small in magnitude but increasingly rapidly for low-income households. Using an event study approach, I find that when a dollar store enters a household’s zip, households shift food expenditure to dollar stores from other food retail channels, with larger effects for low-income, low-access, and non-metro county households. I find that market share is taken from both high-quality and low-quality food retailers, and that new expenditure at dollar stores looks very similar to average expenditure at dollar stores. Households shift food spending away from perishable product groups with limited offerings at the dollar store like dairy and meat, but by a relatively small amount. I find small impacts of dollar store entry on nutrition, particularly for households living in low-access areas with no large food retailer in their zip code. These effects are about 0.03 standard deviations, or about 5% of the nutrition-income gap, and are driven by decreases in dark greens, legumes, protein, and healthy fat and increases in refined grain. This suggests that household store choice could have an important role in food access and nutrition.