Almost 300,000 entitled children do not participate in the UK's Free School Meals (FSM) programme, worth up to £400 per year. Welfare take-up can be stigma and lack of information. This paper uses a school-level dataset and fixed-effect instrumental variables strategy to show that peer-group...

We study the impact on young children's bodyweight of switching from means-tested to universal provision of nutritious free school meals in England, exploiting identifying variation in the timing of weight measurements. We show that exposure to high quality universal free lunches increases...