School meal quality and academic performance

Michael Anderson, Justin Gallagher and Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie

Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley

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; Behavioral and Social Science; Obesity; Clinical Research; Pediatric; Prevention; Prevention of disease and conditions; and promotion of well-being; 3.1 Primary prevention interventions to modify behaviours or promote wellbeing; Cardiovascular; Cancer; Oral and gastrointestinal; Stroke; Metabolic and endocrine; Economic Theory; Applied Economics; Econometrics; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-12-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

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Journal Article: School meal quality and academic performance (2018)
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