{"title":"The effect of universal free school meals on children’s food hardship","authors":"Saied Toossi","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102606","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In the United States, the federal government subsidized universal free school meals (UFSM) nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy ended in June 2022. In response, several state governments subsidized extensions of UFSM statewide into the 2022–2023 school year. I leverage variation in state extensions of UFSM to examine the policy’s impact on school meal participation and rates of food insufficiency. Using data from the Household Pulse Survey and a difference-in-differences approach, I find that children in states that did not extend UFSM were 12.6 percentage points less likely (38.3% reduction over the sample mean) to participate in school meal programs and 1.5 percentage points more likely (9.8% increase over the sample mean) to experience food insufficiency relative to those in states that did.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":6.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Food Policy","FirstCategoryId":"97","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919224000174","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS & POLICY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In the United States, the federal government subsidized universal free school meals (UFSM) nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy ended in June 2022. In response, several state governments subsidized extensions of UFSM statewide into the 2022–2023 school year. I leverage variation in state extensions of UFSM to examine the policy’s impact on school meal participation and rates of food insufficiency. Using data from the Household Pulse Survey and a difference-in-differences approach, I find that children in states that did not extend UFSM were 12.6 percentage points less likely (38.3% reduction over the sample mean) to participate in school meal programs and 1.5 percentage points more likely (9.8% increase over the sample mean) to experience food insufficiency relative to those in states that did.
期刊介绍：
Food Policy is a multidisciplinary journal publishing original research and novel evidence on issues in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies for the food sector in developing, transition, and advanced economies.
Our main focus is on the economic and social aspect of food policy, and we prioritize empirical studies informing international food policy debates. Provided that articles make a clear and explicit contribution to food policy debates of international interest, we consider papers from any of the social sciences. Papers from other disciplines (e.g., law) will be considered only if they provide a key policy contribution, and are written in a style which is accessible to a social science readership.
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