Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
500 S LIMESTONE 109 KINKEAD HALL
LEXINGTON,KY 40526-0001
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Guided by the pressing need to ensure children's access to nutritious food, recent reforms signal a paradigm shift in the design of school meal programs, transitioning towards a location-based assistance model, aiming to make school meals free to all enrolled children. Universal Free School Meals (UFSM) have expanded through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) and are legislated in nine states. While UFSM are presumed to alleviate childhood hunger and administrative burdens, critics worry that they may have a negative impact on student health, particularly obesity. Moreover, school meals account for a sizable portion of children's dietary intake. Thus, the expansion of UFSM will impact household food budgets with ramifications for the retail food trade. Despite ongoing debates, empirical evidence on the effects of UFSM remains lacking. This grant proposal sets out to provide concrete evidence through comprehensive analyses. The research aims to1) analyze the impact of UFSM on household food costs and examine variations among different types of households, 2) evaluate the direct impact of UFSM on food insecurity and children's diet quality, both at school and at home, and 3) investigate the relationship between UFSM and childhood obesity and mental health. The anticipated results will inform policy by providing a comprehensive understanding of how UFSM can contribute to equitable and inclusive school environments that are conducive to nutritional security. The project aligns with broader USDA AFRI program priorities emphasizing food and agricultural policy design and its socio-economic and behavioral impacts.
Animal Health Component
70%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
30%
Applied
70%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
As a timely and important examination of UFSM and its broader implications on various economic and socio-behavioral aspects, the proposed work aligns closely with multiple program area priority scopes with an emphasis on policy design and impacts. Specifically, we substantiate the relevance and significance of this study with regard to the relevant priority scopes:Examine the economics of agriculture and food policy: Agricultural and food policies play an instrumental role in framing the quality, accessibility, and pricing of food products, eventually shaping the landscape of school meal programs. By evaluating the UFSM programs, this study directly probes into the dynamics of these policies and their on-ground manifestations.Economic and behavioral aspects of consumption or savings behavior and the design and implementation of policy intended to affect those behaviors: At the core, the UFSM seeks to alleviate economic burdens from families while ensuring nutritional equity. How these free meals influence household food expenditure, savings behavior, and children's choice of meals can shed light on the broader economic and behavioral ramifications of such policy designs.Examine the causes and consequences of food and nutritional insecurity: Food insecurity in the U.S. remains a pressing concern that links directly to health, economics, and long-term socio-economic mobility. Together with the alignment of the other two priority scopes, the rationale of the proposed study is firmly rooted in its potential to bridge the extant knowledge gaps in UFSM and provide timely and important evidence for policymakers, educators, and researchers.
Project Methods
For objective 1, to measure changes in food costs faced by households, we calculate household-level price indices following methods in Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl (2017), in which inflation rates can be calculated based on household scanner data. Next, we calculate household-level inflation indices, where we set prices at a more aggregated level as an alternative measure for comparison. To align these indices with those that use household-specific prices, we only focus on UPCs that the household purchases in two distinct quarters a year apart.After calculating food price inflation for each household in our sample, we assess the effect of the CEP on the prices households incur for food. We do this by leveraging the temporal and regional variations in the adoption of CEP.For objective 2, we utilize restricted NHANES data that captures important intertemporal factors at the time of dietary recall, such as the intake day of the week and school breaks, we evaluate the impact of eating school meals using a 'difference-in-difference-in-trend' design with a focus on the enrollment of UFSM. Specifically, we examine the differential impact that school in session or closed has for school-meal redeemers, based on their enrollment of UFSM, on the weekly trends in diet quality.For objective 3, we use the merged dataset linking NHANES and school enrollment data; we adopt similar methods as described in objective 2 to validate the relationship between lagged adoption of UFSM and obesity at the national level and then bridge between UFSM and mental health. Additionally,the Arkansas BMI panel allows strong quasi-experimental research designs for causal inference to be used. Given our ability to track children over time coupled with temporal variation in schools' adoption of UFSM, we will estimate average treatment effects using difference-in-differences (DID) models.