Journal of policy analysis and management : [the journal of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management]
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J Policy Anal Manage · Jan 2010
Historical ArticleThe effects of the National School Lunch Program on education and health.
This paper estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on adult health outcomes and educational attainment. I utilize an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a change in the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states. ⋯ These results may suggest that subsidized lunches induced children to attend school but displaced food consumption from other sources. Alternatively, the program may have had short-run health effects that dissipated over time but that facilitated higher educational attainment.