Research

Published Papers

Trends in the School Lunch Program: Changes in Selection, Nutrition & Health with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach (Food Policy. April 2024)

There has been significant media attention on the issue of childhood obesity, leading policymakers to reform the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to include stricter nutritional requirements. We use data on school lunch menus to document improvements in the nutritional quality of school meals between 1991 and 2010. We then evaluate how this change in nutritional content maps into obesity outcomes, using panel data on a nationally representative cohort of children, tracking them from kindergarten entry in fall 2010 through the end of fifth grade in spring 2016. We find little evidence that participation in the school lunch program leads to weight gain, as measured by changes in obesity, overweight, and BMI. These results suggest that improvements in the nutritional content of school lunches have been largely successful in reversing the previously negative relationship between school lunches and childhood obesity. Unrelated to school lunch participation, we find a strong relationship between mother’s obesity status and both the level and growth of children’s obesity, especially for girls and among high-SES families.

Works in Progress

Minimum Wages, Price Ceilings, and Access to the Social Safety Net

Effects of Evanston Guaranteed Income Pilot Program (with Sheridan Fuller, Phoebe Lin, Claire Mackevicius, Pilar Manzi, and Tre Wells)

Spending Responses to Non-recurrent In-kind Transfers: Evidence from the Roll-out of Pandemic EBT (with Krista Ruffini and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach)