Seminar: Inputs, monitoring, and crowd-out in school-based health interventions
Evidence from India's midday meal program
Dr Priya Mukherjee from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be joining the Centre for Health Economics to discuss her research in the seminar 'Inputs, monitoring, and crowd-out in school-based health interventions: Evidence from India's midday meal program'.
Governments often rely on school infrastructure to implement programs targeting children, but whether and to what extent managerial capacity constraints affect the implementation of these programs are important, open questions. We consider these questions in the context of India’s school meals program and iron and folic acid (IFA) supplementation program. Using a randomized controlled trial in a rural district in the state of Odisha, we evaluate the impact of two interventions on child health and on how these government-run programs are implemented. First, we distribute a micronutrient mix (MNM) to be added to the school meal to complement the existing IFA program. Second, we monitor school meals with increased frequency early in the intervention. While we find significant positive effects of distributing the MNM on micronutrient levels in the meals, we find no detectable effects on child health. Increased monitoring of school meals, on the other hand, does improve hemoglobin levels. Monitoring did not affect take-up of the MNM, but it did improve implementation of the government’s IFA program. We also find significant negative spillovers of the MNM intervention on how well the IFA program was implemented, suggesting that effort by school officials was crowded out by the introduction of the new MNM program. We present additional evidence suggesting that these effects are driven by managerial capacity constraints.
Priya will be joining UW-Madison (AAE) in Fall 2020 as an Assistant Professor of Economics. Her research interests lie in Development Economics, with a focus on Political Economy, Education, and Health. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2015.
CHE seminar series
At the Centre for Health Economics, we are working on running as many of our seminars as possible online while COVID-19 remains an obstacle to getting together. As we will be working with experts and colleagues in other parts of the world there will be some movement in the times and days that seminars run to take into account different time zones and availabilities. If you would like to be on our seminar email list, please be directly in contact by email to shannon.stanwell@monash.edu.
Hope to see you there!
Event Details
- Date:
- 8 July 2020 at 9:00 am – 10:00 am
- Venue:
- This seminar will take place via Zoom - please email shannon.stanwell@monash.edu to register
- Categories:
- Health Economics
Description
Evidence from India's midday meal program
Dr Priya Mukherjee from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be joining the Centre for Health Economics to discuss her research in the seminar 'Inputs, monitoring, and crowd-out in school-based health interventions: Evidence from India's midday meal program'.
Governments often rely on school infrastructure to implement programs targeting children, but whether and to what extent managerial capacity constraints affect the implementation of these programs are important, open questions. We consider these questions in the context of India’s school meals program and iron and folic acid (IFA) supplementation program. Using a randomized controlled trial in a rural district in the state of Odisha, we evaluate the impact of two interventions on child health and on how these government-run programs are implemented. First, we distribute a micronutrient mix (MNM) to be added to the school meal to complement the existing IFA program. Second, we monitor school meals with increased frequency early in the intervention. While we find significant positive effects of distributing the MNM on micronutrient levels in the meals, we find no detectable effects on child health. Increased monitoring of school meals, on the other hand, does improve hemoglobin levels. Monitoring did not affect take-up of the MNM, but it did improve implementation of the government’s IFA program. We also find significant negative spillovers of the MNM intervention on how well the IFA program was implemented, suggesting that effort by school officials was crowded out by the introduction of the new MNM program. We present additional evidence suggesting that these effects are driven by managerial capacity constraints.
Priya will be joining UW-Madison (AAE) in Fall 2020 as an Assistant Professor of Economics. Her research interests lie in Development Economics, with a focus on Political Economy, Education, and Health. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2015.
CHE seminar series
At the Centre for Health Economics, we are working on running as many of our seminars as possible online while COVID-19 remains an obstacle to getting together. As we will be working with experts and colleagues in other parts of the world there will be some movement in the times and days that seminars run to take into account different time zones and availabilities. If you would like to be on our seminar email list, please be directly in contact by email to shannon.stanwell@monash.edu.
Hope to see you there!