NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Effects of Weight on Adolescent Educational Attainment

Robert Kaestner, Michael Grossman, Benjamin Yarnoff

NBER Working Paper No. 14994
Issued in May 2009
NBER Program(s):   HE

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In this paper, we investigate the association between weight and adolescent's educational attainment, as measured by highest grade attended, highest grade completed, and drop out status. Data for the study came from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which contains a large, national sample of teens between the ages of 14 and 18. We obtained estimates of the association between weight and educational attainment using several regression model specifications that controlled for a variety of observed characteristics. Our results suggest that, in general, teens that are overweight or obese have levels of attainment that are about the same as teens with average weight.

Published: Effects of Weight on Adolescent Educational Attainment, Robert Kaestner, Michael Grossman, Benjamin Yarnoff, in Economic Aspects of Obesity (2011), University of Chicago Press

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