TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fletcher,Jason M.
AU  - Lehrer,Steven F.
TI  - Using Genetic Lotteries within Families to Examine the Causal Impact of Poor Health on Academic Achievement
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15148
PY  - 2009
Y2  - July 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15148
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15148.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jason Fletcher
Yale University
School of Public Health
60 College Street, #303
New Haven, CT 06510
Tel: (203) 785-5670
Fax: (203) 785-6287
E-Mail: jason.fletcher@yale.edu

Steven F. Lehrer
School of Policy Studies
and Department of Economics
Queen's University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
CANADA
Tel: 613/533-6692
Fax: 613/533-2135
E-Mail: lehrers@post.queensu.ca
AB  - While there is a well-established, large positive correlation between mental and physical health and education outcomes, establishing a causal link remains a substantial challenge. Building on findings from the biomedical literature, we exploit specific differences in the genetic code between siblings within the same family to estimate the causal impact of several poor health conditions on academic outcomes. We present evidence of large impacts of poor mental health on academic achievement. Further, our estimates suggest that family fixed effects estimators by themselves cannot fully account for the endogeneity of poor health. Finally, our sensitivity analysis suggests that these differences in specific portions of the genetic code have good statistical properties and that our results are robust to reasonable violations of the exclusion restriction assumption.
ER  -