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

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 10086

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Analysis of Education ; Education and Economic Development ; Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
• Subject: school feeding ; learning ; midday meal ; primary school education

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Chakraborty, Tanika ; Jayaraman, Rajshri
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2016

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/145220
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET