The effects of the National School Lunch Program on education and health

Abstract

This paper estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on adult health outcomes and educational attainment. I utilize an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a change in the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states. Identification is achieved by the fact that different birth cohorts were exposed to different degrees to the original formula and the new formula, along with the fact that the change of the formula affected states differentially by per capita income. Participation in the program as a child appears to have few long-run effects on health, but the effects on educational attainment are sizable. These results may suggest that subsidized lunches induced children to attend school but displaced food consumption from other sources. Alternatively, the program may have had short-run health effects that dissipated over time but that facilitated higher educational attainment. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

US Food and Nutrition Programs

“…The act's statement of purpose indicates that a nonprofit school lunch program should be established "as a measure of national security" with the dual purposes "to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation's children and to 13 encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other food…" Under the Act, commodities were distributed and cash payments were made to states according to a formula that was a function of per-capita income and population. The NSLP was significantly amended in 1962 to adjust the funding formula to become a function of both the program participation rate and the "assistance need rate" that was a function of the state's average per capita income (Hinrichs 2010). …”

“…In the spirit of the program rollout literature described in the SNAP section above, Hinrichs (2010) leverages changes in NSLP funding formulas during the early years of the program to estimate the long-run impacts of the expansion of the program. He finds that increasing NSLP exposure in a state by 10 percentage points increases completed education by nearly 1 year for males, and one-third of a year for females.…”

How effective are the nutritional programs for schoolchildren in Romania?

“…Such programs have both a positive impact on improving the nutritional intakes of the all participating children and reducing the inequalities in diet for children from different social backgrounds (Adamson et al, 2012, He, 2012, Hinrichs, 2010.…”

Federal nutrition programs and childhood obesity: inside the black box

“…While this is potentially attributable to children's propensity to consume more food while at home, it could also be explained by the lack of access to school meal programs during the summer for non-summer school attendees. Hinrichs (2010) estimates the long-run e¤ects of participation in NSLP at its inception on health as adults and educational outcomes. To isolate the e¤ects of the participation in the NSLP from the possibly confounding in ‡uences of other federal programs like SBP, SNAP and WIC that came into existence much later, the author focuses on data from 1947.…”