School Feeding and Learning Achievement: Evidence from India's Midday Meal Program

Tanika Chakraborty () and Rajshri Jayaraman ()
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Rajshri Jayaraman: European School of Management and Technology (ESMT)

No 10086, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the effect of the world's largest school feeding program on children's learning outcomes. Staggered implementation across different states of a 2001 Indian Supreme Court Directive mandating the introduction of free school lunches in public primary schools generates plausibly exogenous variation in program exposure across different birth cohorts. We exploit this to estimate the effect of program exposure on math and reading test scores of primary school-aged children. We find that midday meals have a dramatic positive effect on learning achievement: children with up to 5 years of primary school exposure improve their test scores by approximately 10-20%. We further investigate various channels that may account for this improvement including enrollment and nutrition-learning effects, heterogeneous responses by socio-economic status, complementary schooling inputs, and intra-household redistribution.

Keywords: midday meal; learning; school feeding; primary school education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I25 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Journal of Development Economics, 2019, 319, 249 - 265

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Related works:
Journal Article: School feeding and learning achievement: Evidence from India's midday meal program (2019)
Working Paper: School Feeding and Learning Achievement: Evidence from India's Midday Meal Program (2016)
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