 Do School Food Programs Improve Child Dietary Quality?American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2017, vol. 99, issue 2, 339-356 Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of U.S. school food programs on the distribution of child dietary quality during 2005–10. The distributional approach allows one to better understand how school food impacts children prone to low-quality diets separately from those prone to higher-quality diets. Using a fixed-effects quantile estimator, I find notable heterogeneity in the general population—school food has positive impacts below the median of the dietary-quality distribution, and negative but insignificant impacts at upper quantiles. Children demonstrating substantial nutritional needs (i.e., food insecure or receiving free/reduced price meals) exhibit positive impacts at all levels of diet quality with especially high benefits at low quantiles. Although school food programs may not benefit the “above-average” child, they do improve the diets of the most nutritionally disadvantaged. Keywords: National School Lunch Program; School Breakfast Program; diet quality; fixed-effect quantile estimation (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:oup:ajagec:v:99:y:2017:i:2:p:339-356. Access Statistics for this article American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.