Going to School at Better Schools can Improve Children's Health: The Health benefits of the 2009 Right to Education Act in India

This work demonstrates the unintended benefits to health that can result from school policy. We evaluate the impact of a large education reform (Right to Education Act, 2009) in India on children’s health, measured as height-for-age z-scores. Using data from the India Human Development Surveys, we employ a difference-in-differences approach that exploits differential timing in the adoption of the reform across states. We find positive health effects due to the reform with larger impacts in states that adopted it earlier. The benefits do not differ across boys and girls but is larger for children from lower castes, and those who live farther from school. Our findings are robust to multiple robustness checks, including a regression discontinuity design that uses children’s birth-year as a source of variation for their potential exposure to the mandates of the Right to Education Act.