Take-up of Free School Meals: Price effects and peer effects

Arbeitspapier

Almost 300,000 entitled children do not participate in the UK's Free School Meals (FSM) programme, worth up to £400 per year. Welfare take-up can be stigma and lack of information. This paper uses a school-level dataset and fixed-effect instrumental variables strategy to show that peer-group participation has a substantial role in overcoming these barriers. Identification of endogenous peer effects is achieved by exploiting a scheme which extended FSM entitlement to all children in some school cohorts. Results show that in a typical school a 10 percentage point rise in peer-group take-up would reduce non-participation by almost a quarter.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: ISER Working Paper Series ; No. 2012-12

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions ; Education: Government Policy ; Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs ; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
• Subject: school meals ; peer effects ; welfare stigma ; aggregated data

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Holford, Angus
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Essex, Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER)
• (where): Colchester
• (when): 2012

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/65989
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET