TY - RPRT AU - Bernal, Noelia AU - Costa-Font, Joan AU - Ritter, Patricia TI - The Effect of Health Insurance on Child Nutritional Outcomes. Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design in Peru PY - 2022/Aug/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 15490 UR - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp15490 AB - We study the effect of health insurance expansion on nutrition-related children's health outcomes. We exploit quasi-random variation from an insurance expansion targeted at poor households in Peru. We find that access to insurance reduces childhood obesity and exerts positive and economically significant effects on some preventive health care utilization and behaviours, such as children's regular growth checks-ups and deworming treatments, the duration of breastfeeding, and a substitution of foods rich in carbohydrates for other foods rich in proteins. In contrast, we do not find any effect on other outcomes typically related to other interventions. KW - children’s health KW - obesity KW - overweight KW - public health insurance KW - health behaviors KW - nutrition KW - breast-feeding ER -