Arbeitspapier

School Feeding and Learning Achievement: Evidence from India's Midday Meal Program

We study the effect of the world's largest school feeding program on children's learning outcomes. Staggered implementation across different states of a 2001 Indian Supreme Court Directive mandating the introduction of free school lunches in public primary schools generates plausibly exogenous variation in program exposure across different birth cohorts. We exploit this to estimate the effect of program exposure on math and reading test scores of primary school-aged children. We find that midday meals have a dramatic positive effect on learning achievement: children with up to 5 years of primary school exposure improve their test scores by approximately 10-20%. We further investigate various channels that may account for this improvement including enrollment and nutrition-learning effects, heterogeneous responses by socio-economic status, complementary schooling inputs, and intra-household redistribution.

Sprache
Englisch

Erschienen in
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 10086

Klassifikation
Wirtschaft
Analysis of Education
Education and Economic Development
Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
Thema
school feeding
learning
midday meal
primary school education

Ereignis
Geistige Schöpfung
(wer)
Chakraborty, Tanika
Jayaraman, Rajshri
Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wer)
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
(wo)
Bonn
(wann)
2016

Handle
Letzte Aktualisierung
10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ

Datenpartner

Dieses Objekt wird bereitgestellt von:
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.

Objekttyp

  • Arbeitspapier

Beteiligte

  • Chakraborty, Tanika
  • Jayaraman, Rajshri
  • Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Entstanden

  • 2016

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