 School meal quality and academic performanceMichael Anderson, Justin Gallagher and Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie Journal of Public Economics, 2018, vol. 168, issue C, 81-93 Abstract: Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in particular, the rising childhood obesity rate. Medical and nutrition literature has long argued that a healthy diet can have a second important impact: improved cognitive function. In this paper, we test whether offering healthier meals affects student achievement as measured by test scores. Our sample includes all California (CA) public schools over a five-year period. We estimate difference-in-differences style regressions using variation that takes advantage of frequent meal-vendor contract turnover. Students at schools that contract with a healthy school-meal vendor score higher on CA state achievement tests. We do not find any evidence that healthier school meals lead to a decrease in obesity rates. The test score gains, while modest in magnitude, come at very low cost. Keywords: Nutrition (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:168:y:2018:i:c:p:81-93 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.09.013 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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