 Does the provision of universal free school meals improve school attendance?Daniel Borbely, Markus Gehrsitz, Stuart McIntyre and Gennaro Rossi Economics of Education Review, 2024, vol. 103, issue C Abstract: We examine the effects of universal free school meal (UFSM) policies on school attendance and health-related absences. We leverage UFSM implementation in Scotland where all pupils in the first three grades of primary schools became automatically entitled to claim free meals, regardless of their households’ financial circumstances. We estimate a difference-in-differences model with variation in school-level exposure to the policy and find that, in spite of a large increase in take-up rates, attendance did not improve. Using an alternative exposure measure that includes those pupils switching from paid to free school meals, we find small positive and negative effects on attendance and health-related absences respectively. These findings would suggest the presence of a channel whereby financial savings by families encourage attendance, but these effects are too small to be considered economically meaningful. Keywords: Attendance; Behaviour; School meals; Welfare (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:ecoedu:v:103:y:2024:i:c:s0272775724000918 DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2024.102597 Access Statistics for this article Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier |
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