Free lunch for all? The impact of universal school lunch on student misbehavior

Abstract South Korean primary and secondary schools have been providing free lunches only to low-income students since the 1980s. In the early 2010s, the Free School Meal Program (FSMP) expanded the provision of free lunches to all students, without altering the nutritional content of the school meals or the school meal take-up rate, which has always been very high. We investigate the impact of this universal school lunch program on the incidence of misbehavior in schools. We find that FSMP reduces the number of behavioral incidents, particularly physical fights between students, by about 35%.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Economics of Education Review

• Publication date

  2020-02-01

• Fields of study

  Education, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.101945
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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