The Department for Education’s Universal Infant Free School Meal (FSM) scheme has since 2014 has provided a free school lunch to all children in the first three years of state-funded primary school in England. Scrapping, retaining or extending this £600m/year scheme are all politically live options within the next electoral cycle. Some Local Authorities provided Universal FSM to infant or older children long before this, and others provide Universal FSM throughout primary school. We use difference-in-difference methods to evaluate the effect of Universal FSM schemes in these Local Authorities since 2004, on children’s bodyweight outcomes and academic performance at age 11. We use school-level data from the National Child Measurement Programme and child-level data from the National Pupil Database. Results have not yet undergone disclosure by the data owners to enable us to trail them in this abstract, but the talk will include a lot of tests of the identifying assumption of parallel counterfactual trends holds, and adjustments to the standard two-way fixed effects difference-in-difference models to account for variation in treatment timing, lagged effects and heterogeneity of effects by duration of exposure.
Presented by:
Angus Holford
Date & time:
June 8, 2022 11:30 am
Venue:
Hybrid event: room 5B.24 & remotely via Zoom - contact the series organisers (at iserseminars@essex.ac.uk) if you do not have the link.
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