Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “What If There is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch? Analyzing Community Eligibility Provision Groupings and Participation” - Jack Keefer

Speaker

Jack Keefer, PhD Student, UC Santa Barbara

Biography

Jack Keefer is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also received a Master’s in Economics. Prior to joining UC Santa Barbara, Jack received a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Economics from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. His research focuses on education and public policy, with past work examining school nutrition programs and identifying unclaimed meal funding in the Community Eligibility Provision. Jack has served as Head Teaching Assistant at UC Santa Barbara, an Adjunct Lecturer at Cal Poly, and an Adjunct Professor at Westmont College.

Event Details

Jack will be presenting his Advancement to Candidacy paper, “What If There is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch? Analyzing Community Eligibility Provision Groupings and Participation”. To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.

Abstract

With the goal of improving child food security and school nutrition program financial viability, the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows schools to provide free meals to all students and be reimbursed at a rate dependent on a measure of its low-income student percentage. When participating, districts can also group their schools together, applying with a combined low-income percentage that provides greater benefits than the sum of the individual schools. However, solving this grouping problem by comparing each application option is infeasible for even moderate sized districts as the search region grows exponentially with the number of schools.

In this paper, I present a method to reformulate and quickly solve the CEP school grouping problem using Mathematical Programming and estimate the amount of profit and free meals unclaimed by districts due to suboptimal CEP grouping and participation choices. I find that the districts in my analysis could earn an additional $450 million in CEP profits or serve an additional 100 million meals while increasing profits with better CEP application decisions. I then provide simple ”rules-of-thumb” that can be used to improve CEP grouping.

JEL Codes: H22, I24, I38, C61