Description/Abstract
We provide new evidence on the effect of adolescent health behaviors/outcomes (obesity, depression, smoking, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)) on schooling attainment using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We take two different approaches to deal with omitted variable bias and reverse causality. Our first approach attends to the issue of reverse causality by using health polygenic scores (PGSs) as proxies for actual adolescent health. Second, we estimate the effect of adolescent health using sibling fixed-effects models that control for unmeasured genetic and family factors shared by siblings. We use the PGSs as additional controls in the sibling fixedeffects models to reduce concerns about residual confounding from sibling-specific genetic differences. We find consistent evidence across both approaches that being genetically predisposed to smoking and smoking regularly in adolescence reduces schooling attainment. We find mixed evidence for ADHD. Our estimates suggest that having a high genetic risk for ADHD reduces grades of schooling, but we do not find any statistically significant negative effects of ADHD on grades of schooling. Finally, results from both approaches show no consistent evidence for a detrimental effect of obesity or depression on schooling attainment.
Document Type
Working Paper
Date
7-2020
Keywords
Adolescent Health, Polygenic Scores, Education
Language
English
Funder(s)
NIH
Funding ID
1R01HD094011-01
Series
Working Papers Series
Acknowledgements
This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. The authors acknowledge research funding from NIH grant number 1R01HD094011-01. We thank Daniel Eisenberg and Petri Böckerman for useful comments, and Christian Failla for research assistance.
Disciplines
Economic Policy | Economics | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
ISSN
1525-3066
Recommended Citation
Amin, Vikesh; Behrman, Jere R.; Fletcher, Jason M.; Flores, Carlos A.; Flores-Lagunes, Alfonso; and Kohler, Hans-Peter, "Genetic Risks, Adolescent Health and Schooling Attainment" (2020). Center for Policy Research. 261.
https://surface.syr.edu/cpr/261
Source
Local input
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Additional Information
Working paper no. 232