California Accepted Papers Paper:
Who Takes up a Free Lunch? Food Spending and the Summer Food Service Program.
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The Summer Food Service Program is a federal program that provides free meals for children in low-income census tracts. However, the program does not directly means-test its recipients, and there is no evidence showing that the children who attend SFSP sites are low-income. I link household grocery spending data to temporal and geographical variation in program availability and show that access to the Summer Food Service Program reduces food spending for households with children in ZIP code-weeks with SFSP sites. Evidence suggests that take-up is not concentrated among low-income households, with strong evidence of take-up for middle-income households. Sites can be run by any non-profit organization, and different types of organizations may be better at targeting low-income children than others. I find that sites run by schools predominantly serve middle-income households, with suggestive evidence that low-income households are better served by community centers. My analysis shows that targeting based on census tract income is not sufficient to ensure that low-income children take up.
