Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Holford, Angus
Title: Take-up of Free School Meals: price effects and peer effects
Abstract: Almost 300,000 entitled children do not participate
in the UK’s Free School Meals (FSM) programme, worth up to £400 per year.
Welfare take-up can be deterred by stigma and lack of information. This paper uses a
school-level dataset and fixed-effect instrumental variables strategy to show
that peer-group participation has a substantial role in overcoming these
barriers. Identification of endogenous peer effects is achieved by exploiting a
scheme which extended FSM entitlement to all children in some school cohorts.
Results show that in a typical school a 10 percentage point rise in peer-group
take-up would reduce non-participation by almost a quarter.

Creation-Date: 20120720
Number: 2012-12
Publication-Status: published
File-URL: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/working-papers/iser/2012-12.pdf
File-Format: Application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:ese:iserwp:2012-12