Groceries or School Cafeterias: How Households Respond to School Nutrition Mandates
研究了美国《健康无饥饿儿童法案》对学校餐食的营养规定如何影响家庭食品购买行为，发现家庭减少了杂货食品购买量，且质量略有下降，尤其对时间和财务受限的家庭影响更大。
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) placed strict nutritional mandates on meals served at U.S. public schools. This policy offers a unique opportunity to study household response to a large, exogenous change in healthiness of food available to their children. Did more healthy school meals lead households to substitute toward them, and away from grocery food purchases? Which households were more responsive to the nutritional mandates? And was there any spillover effect on the nutritional quality of their grocery food purchases? The authors document a meaningful decrease in the quantity of grocery food in response to the HHFKA, and a small decrease in quality. Consistent with substitution toward school meals, more of the quantity decrease is attributable to items likely to be purchased for children and categories traditionally associated with breakfast and lunch (the meals served at school). The HHFKA attracted even greater participation from financially constrained and time-constrained households for whom school meals were already important and were now coupled with the additional benefit of healthier food. These findings have important implications for policy makers and researchers, but also for food manufacturers and retailers.