The Effect of Free School Meals on Household Food Purchases: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision

Designed to increase access to meals for low income students, the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) eliminates applications for free and reduced price school meals and allows high poverty schools to provide free meals for all students, regardless of their family income. As of 2017, this program was available to more than 9.5 million students in more than 20,000 schools across the US. This paper considers the effects of providing free school meals through this program on household food spending and diet composition. CEP decreases the price of school meals (to zero) for families of children that would previously have been ineligible for free school meals based on family income. In addition, application costs and stigma costs are eliminated for previously eligible students. However, the overall effects of this program on household grocery store purchases are ambiguous, depending on whether the substitution or income effects dominate as school meals become relatively cheaper. Given that this program could increase school district costs, understanding the potentially offsetting savings in family consumption is essential. We examine the effect of this decrease in the price of school meals on the pattern of grocery store purchases for households with elementary, middle, and high school aged children using the Nielsen household panel data from 2004-2016. We link households to school-level data on the year of CEP adoption using school attendance boundaries and zip code of household residence. We use data on household income to study the effect of CEP adoption on households with and without access to free or reduced price school meals before the program. We find that household spending on food purchases decreases after children gain access to free school meals. We further explore diet composition and heterogeneous effects across households.