Childhood nutrition and labor market outcomes: Evidence from a school breakfast program

Abstract

While a growing literature documents the short-term effects of public programs providing children with nutritious food, there is scarce evidence of the long-term effects of such programs. This paper studies the long-term consequences of access to nutritious food using the rollout of a free school breakfast program in Norwegian cities. This program provided children with nutritious food and replaced a hot school meal at the end of the day with similar caloric value but less micronutrients. Our results indicate that access to a nutritious school breakfast increases education by 0.1 years and earnings by 2-4 percent. * The authors thank the Norwegian Research Council for financial support (grant number 240321). We gratefully acknowledge comments from Na'ama Shenhav, Gordon Dahl, David Figlio, and seminar participants at

Swallow This: Childhood and Adolescent Exposure to Fast Food Restaurants, BMI, and Cognitive Ability

“…When it comes to cognitive ability, the effects are only significant in the early years. 40 This is consistent with evidence on critical periods and brain development (Heckman, 2007;Berg et al, 2014), as well as with the notion that proper nutrition might matter, especially for young children (Anderson et al, 2018;Bütikofer et al, 2018;Lundborg et al, 2022). These results are also broadly consistent with the event studies presented in Figure 2.…”

“…Prior research suggests that proper childhood nutrition could affect education and test scores (see, e.g., Anderson et al, 2018;Bütikofer et al, 2018;Lundborg et al, 2022;Gertler and Gracner, 2022), while some epidemiological studies have attempted to directly link obesity and intelligence (see, e.g., Yu et al, 2010;Belsky et al, 2013). Thus, going beyond health outcomes, we also investigate whether access to fast food restaurants affects cognitive ability.…”

“…If anything, this point estimate is negative. This is interesting given the literature linking nutrition and height (see, e.g., Grasgruber et al, 2014) as well as nutrition and educational achievement (see, e.g., Bütikofer et al, 2018;Lundborg et al, 2022). We do acknowledge, however, that the estimate is not very precise and we cannot rule out negative effects as large as 0.4 cm for an average exposure to fast food restaurants.…”

The effect of free school fruit on academic performance: a nationwide quasi-experiment

“…In developed countries, free school meals (1) and improved school meal quality (2) have been reported to improve academic performance. Long-term beneficial outcomes such as higher educational attainment and higher adult income have been reported as potential effects of the current Swedish school meal program (3), the historical Norwegian Oslo breakfast (4), and the US National School Lunch Program (5). The literature on healthy eating at school and academic performance has mainly focused on broad nutritional interventions relating to meals such as lunch and breakfast.…”

A Framework for Assessing Socio-Economic Impact of Covid-19 at Household Level

“…Although statistics show that elderly population are disproportionately affected from COVID-19, the physical and mental health problems can be a concern for all age groups. The nutritional intake has seriously been affected due to the pandemic with immediate effect on physical and cognitive development among the children in the short run, and subsequently on labor market outcomes in the long run ( Alex-petersen, 2017;Bloom, Canning, and Shenoy, 2012;Bütikofer, Mølland, and Salvanes, 2018;McGovern, Krishna, Aguayo, and Subramanian, 2017). In addition, the pandemic may alter immune responses…”