School Lunch Quality and Academic Performance - Working Paper 23218

Sep 15, 2026

Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a major policy priority, driven by students’ health and especially the trend in childhood obesity. Beyond physical outcomes, prior nutrition and medical research suggests healthier diets can also enhance cognitive performance and learning. This paper evaluates whether offering healthier lunches improves student achievement using test scores, leveraging a California five-year dataset and difference-in-differences methods tied to frequent lunch vendor contract turnover.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages47

Reading Time1 h 58 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Research question and policy motivation

Data and empirical strategy

Measuring nutritional quality

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES SCHOOL LUNCH QUALITY AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE Michael L. Anderson Justin Gallagher Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie Working Paper 23218 [http://www.nber.org/papers/w23218](http://www.nber.org/papers/w23218) NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 March 2017 The authors would like to thank Peter Hinrichs, Scott Imberman, Aaron Sojourner, and Mary Zaki for helpful comments on this project. The authors also thank Paul Fisher, Anthony Gatti, Sarah Mattson, Jonathon Mobley, and Aaron Weisberg for outstanding research assistance. A special thanks to Grace Chan and Pat Crawford at the Nutrition Policy Institute for their analysis of the nutritional content of the lunches o ered by the school lunch vendors. This work was supported by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch Project 233535. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2017 by Michael L. Anderson, Justin Gallagher, and Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. School Lunch Quality and Academic Performance Michael L. Anderson, Justin Gallagher, and Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie NBER Working Paper No. 23218 March 2017 JEL No. I12,I20 ABSTRACT Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in particular, the rising childhood obesity rate. Medical and nutrition literature has long argued that a healthy diet can have a second important impact: improved cognitive function. In this paper, we test whether offering healthier lunches affects student achievement as measured by test scores. Our sample includes all California (CA) public schools over a five-year period. We estimate difference-in-difference style regressions using variation that takes advantage of frequent lunch vendor contract turnover. Students at schools that contract with a healthy school lunch vendor score higher on CA state achievement tests, with larger test score increases for students who are eligible for reduced price or free school lunches. We do not find any evidence that healthier school lunches lead to a decrease in obesity rates. Michael L. Anderson Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics 207 Giannini Hall, MC 3310 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 and NBER [mlanderson@berkeley.edu](mlanderson@berkeley.edu) Justin Gallagher Department of Economics Weatherhead School of Management Case Western Reserve University 10900 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, OH 44106-7235 [jpg75@case.edu](jpg75@case.edu) Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie 207 Giannini Hall MC 3310 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3310 [elizabeth.ramirez@berkeley.edu](elizabeth.ramirez@berkeley.edu) 1 Introduction Improving the nutritional content of public school meals in the US is a topic of intense policy interest (Confessore [2014]) . A primary motivation underlying these nutritional improvements is to increase student health and reduce childhood obesity rates. A question of comparable import, however, is whether healthier meals a􀀋ect student achievement. Recent research demonstrates that the provision of subsidized school meals can signi􀀌cantly increase school test scores (Figlio and Winicki [2005]; Dotter [2014]; Imberman and Kugler [2014]; Frisvold [2015]), but to date little evidence exists on how the quality of school meals a􀀋ects student ac

FAQs

What is the main research question of the paper?

The paper tests whether healthier school lunches affect student achievement as measured by academic test scores.

How does the study identify the effect of lunch quality?

It uses difference-in-differences style regressions based on variation from frequent lunch vendor contract turnover across California school districts.

What nutritional quality measure do the authors use?

They measure lunch nutritional quality with an enhanced Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score based on how well food offerings align with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Sep 15, 2026

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