Working Paper Series,
Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: We examine the long-term impact of a policy that introduced free and nutritious school lunches in Swedish primary schools. For this purpose, we use historical data on the gradual implementation of the policy across municipalities and employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate the impact of this lunch policy on a broad range of medium and longterm outcomes, including lifetime income, health, cognitive skills, and education. Our results show that the school lunch program generated substantial long-term benefits, where pupils exposed to the program during their entire primary school period have 3 percent greater life-time earnings. In addition, we find the effect to be greater for pupils that were exposed at earlier ages and for pupils from poor households. Finally, exposure to the school lunch program had substantial effects on educational attainment and health and these effects can explain a large part of the return to school lunches.

Keywords: nutrition; early life; childhood; long-term; income; causal

JEL-codes: I12; I38; J24

55 pages, April 9, 2018

Full text files

FULLTEXT01.pdf  Full text

Download statistics

• Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research
• Ordering Working Papers
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Daniel Rossetti ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

RePEc:hhs:sofiwp:2018_004This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:17:10.