Comments on “School Meals and Classroom Performance: Evidence from India” by Bidisha

Barooah

Manisha ShahUCLA & NBER

Summary

• School Meals can improve learning by:1. Attendance ↑2. Child Health ↑3. Attention span ↑

• Paper focuses on attention span, uses maze score outcomes.

• Finds school lunches increase maze scores—i.e. improve attention span

• Well thought out empirics, nice contribution, etc.

Interpretation of Results

• What is relationship between maze score (measures non-cognitive outcomes), health, and cognitive outcomes?

• If I am smarter and/or healthier do I score higher on maze test? (can test this)

• Paper shows school lunches improve BMI outcomes. What about attendance?

• Wondering about channels and nailing it down more. (i.e. what if lunch makes me healthier which gives me more attention (or maybe just makes me smarter) which results in higher score on maze test? etc.)

Gender Results

• Very interesting • Seems like this is basically an intervention that

benefits girls—not boys• Why are take up rates for boys so low?• Which is nutritionally better: tiffin or school

lunch? • Do girls have lower baseline nutrition?

Other (jetlagged!) questions

• You have nice session level data that you average into one score—why? Seems like results could be even bigger if you looked at pre/post lunch scores

• Why didn’t you test 8th graders?• Table 6: shouldn’t C/T scores in grade 7 differ in

phase 1? • Are schools actually providing lunches? (ASER

school dataset)