 Childhood nutrition and labor market outcomes: Evidence from a school breakfast programAline Bütikofer, Eirin Mølland and Kjell G Salvanes Journal of Public Economics, 2018, vol. 168, issue C, 62-80 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 and intergenerational 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 2–3%. In addition, we present empirical evidence that early exposure is most beneficial, that a longer treatment duration does not yield higher returns, and that the positive effects on men's earnings are transmitted across generations. Our results are mostly robust to adding municipality-specific time trends, event-study models support the validity of the research design, and most estimated effects survive adjustment for multiple hypothesis testing. Keywords: Long-term effects; Nutrition; School meals (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:62-80 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.08.008 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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