Intrahousehold flypaper effects - Quasi-experimental evidence from a randomized school-feeding program in rural northwestern China

This paper estimates intrahousehold flypaper effects using data from a school-based randomized nutrition intervention that aimed to reduce anemia prevalence among primary schoolers in rural northwestern China. Since randomized treatment assignment ensures that preexisting boarder-nonboarder differences in diet are statistically similar between treatment and control schools, boarder-nonboarder comparisons of treatment-control differences in students' nutritional outcomes offers an alternative Difference-in-Differences research design allowing us to estimate credible flypaper effects. Using diet diversity of boarders in the treatment group (who presumably consumed most of the project-provided food) as a benchmark, we found that the gain in diet diversity of treated nonboarders due the intervention was reduced by more than 70% at home, which led to a significant loss of at least 4.4 g/L in their gain in Hemoglobin levels. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.