The Effects of Nutritional Gains on Human Capital Development: Evidence from Primary School Lunch Program in 1960s Taiwan

During the 1960s, Taiwan launched a school lunch program, funded by the U.S. Aid, for primary school students. This paper evaluates the long-term human capital improvements of school lunch recipients. We measure the extent of the school lunch program at the region level using the percentage of primary school students who are provided with school lunch. Our identification strategy is the difference-in-differences approach which compares the outcome difference between exposed and non-exposed cohorts in regions with a higher program intensity to the outcome difference in regions with a lower program intensity. Based on nationwide data sets from Taiwan, we find that children who lived in the region with a higher program intensity are more likely to be employed and earn more during their middle ages than their peers who lived in the region with a lower program intensity. We also find evidence that the program led to an increase in years of schooling, and further analysis suggests that the effect is driven by improving nutrition intake instead of a spillover effect of increasing school enrollment.