Table 3 - uploaded by Steven Lehrer
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This paper examines the influence of health conditions on academic performance during adolescence. To account for the endogeneity of health outcomes and their interactions with risky behaviors we exploit natural variation within a set of genetic markers across individuals. We present strong evidence that these genetic markers serve as valid instrum...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... justify our four sets of genetic markers and two by their polygenic interactions to explain health behavior and status we begin by examining whether there are differences in health measures between individuals with different genetic markers. Table 3 presents information on summary measures for each genetic marker. That is, each cell contains the conditional mean, standard deviation and odds ratio of alternative health outcomes for individuals that possess a particular marker. ...
Context 2
... are limited efficiency gains and no substantial differences in the magnitude or significance of any of our results in this section moving from 2sls to 3sls. For completeness, 3sls results that correspond to Table 7 are presented in Appendix Table 3. The only minor change is that in the full sample with health vector 1, depression is now significant at the 10% rather the 5% level but the magnitude is virtually unchanged. ...
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Citations
... Due to the empirical challenges involved in assessing causality in the relationship, there is less agreement on what the precise mechanisms are that drive this correlation. As fi rst highlighted by Grossman (1973) and more recently by other authors including Cutler and Lleras-Muney (2006); Ding et al. (2006); Gan and Gong (2007), health and education may interact in three not mutually exclusive ways: ...
... These health conditions and risk factors tend to coincide with and affect each other, as indicated by the double-headed arrow connecting the left-hand boxes. One study illustrated this clearly: studying adolescents in the United States, Ding et al. (2006) found striking differences in the estimated impacts of depression and obesity when examining a single health state in isolation. That research also concluded that individuals with health disorders such as obesity or depression were signifi cantly more likely to smoke. ...
... Mediating factors include all those aspects determined by health that in turn can have an impact on educational outcomes e.g. (Ding et al., 2006): • cognitive and learning skills development • treatment received by children in the classroom in connection with their health condition(s) • discrimination by peers • self-esteem • students' physical energy. ...
This paper examines the causal link between parenting style and children’s educational outcomes. The existing literature seems to lack any effort to use a nationally representative data from the United States, to properly address endogeneity, or to examine educational outcomes beyond high school level. This paper attempts to mitigate these shortcomings. Drawing upon the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, it first used OLS and logit regression. It then applied the maximum simulated likelihood approach to get rid of endogeneity, thereby isolating the causal impact of parenting style on children’s educational outcomes. Findings suggested that parenting style mattered for children academic performance. Authoritative parenting style was found to be the best among all types of parenting style. Particularly, relative to uninvolved parents’ children, authoritatively reared children were predicted to have 1.1 more years of schooling and be 18.5, 13.6, and 16.3 percentage points more likely to obtain at least bachelor’s degree, associate’s degree, and high school diploma, respectively. Also, they had 5.5 percentage points less likelihood of being high school dropouts than children reared by uninvolved parents.
... The impacts of adolescent depression on educational outcomes are more significant in females. Ding et al. (2006) utilize a novel method of incorporating DNA information to control for individual hereditary factors that may affect both education attainment and wages to estimate the relationship between educational outcomes and adolescent depression. The study finds that females with adolescent depression on average have a GPA lower than their nondepressed counterparts, and lower than male adolescents with similar levels of depression. ...
... Information on education and the presence and severity of depressive symptoms during adolescence are collected from 531 randomized individuals who are currently (age 30) undergoing outpatient treatments for chronic depression, while the wage information is obtained from the 1995 US Census Bureau's Current Population survey. Similar to Fletcher (2010) and Ding et al. (2006), they find that only females who suffered from adolescent depression display significant reduction in educational attainment. Then using education, age and gender as matching variables between the two data sources, the study predicts a wage penalty from 12% at age 21 and progressively peaked to 18% at age 55 for a female who has experienced depression as adolescence. ...
It is well recognized that a depressive mental state can persist for a long time, and this can adversely impact labour market outcomes. The aim of this article is to examine the direct association between depression status in late-teenage years and adult wages, as well as the indirect association, operating through accumulated education, experience and occupation choice. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data, we find adolescent depression is associated with a wage penalty of around 10–15%, but its mechanics are very different for males and females. For males, about three quarters of the wage penalty is through the direct channel, whilst for females the indirect effect channel is dominant. The indirect channel is driven by lower accumulated education, mostly because depression discourages further study post high school. These results are important because they imply that the association between adolescent depression and wages is stronger than has been estimated in previous cross-sectional studies.
... references are:Norton et al. (1998); Salganik et al. (2008);Aral et al. (2009);Hogan and Lancaster (2004);Land and Deane (1992);Ding et al. (2006);Fletcher and Lehrer (2009); Langbehn et al. (2004); Visal-Puig et al. (1996);Greene (2003);Hardin and Carroll (2003);Hogan et al. (2004); and Noel and Nyhan (2011).weighting for causal inference from longitudinal observational studies. ...
Supplementary Materials.
... but the effect is insignificant based on the weak-instrument robust confidence bounds. 20 18 See Fletcher and Lehrer (2009), Ding et al. (2006Ding et al. ( , 2009 and Norton and Han (2008) for other applications that use genetic markers as instruments. These studies use a similar approach to evaluate the instrument validity (Ding 2006;Ding et al. 2009;Fletcher and Lehrer 2009;Norton and Han 2008). ...
... 20 18 See Fletcher and Lehrer (2009), Ding et al. (2006Ding et al. ( , 2009 and Norton and Han (2008) for other applications that use genetic markers as instruments. These studies use a similar approach to evaluate the instrument validity (Ding 2006;Ding et al. 2009;Fletcher and Lehrer 2009;Norton and Han 2008). 19 Table A3 in the Appendix reports the full regression results along with the tests of the IV assumption and Table A4 reports the coefficients of the first stages of the 2SLS models. ...
There is a large literature showing the detrimental effects of prenatal smoking on birth and childhood health outcomes. It is somewhat unclear though, whether these effects are causal or reflect other characteristics and choices by mothers who choose to smoke that may also affect child health outcomes or biased reporting of smoking. In this paper we use genetic markers that predict smoking behaviors as instruments to address the endogeneity of smoking choices in the production of birth and childhood health outcomes. Our results indicate that prenatal smoking produces more dramatic declines in birth weight than estimates that ignore the endogeneity of prenatal smoking, which is consistent with previous studies with non-genetic instruments. We use data from two distinct samples from Norway and the United States with different measured instruments and find nearly identical results. The study provides a novel application that can be extended to study several behavioral impacts on health and social and economic outcomes.
... Finally, the ν i represents a vector of child-or family-specific time-invariant unobserved characteristics that may be associated with children's weight outcomes. For example, there may be unobserved genetic characteristics that predispose some children to weight problems (Ding et al., 2006). Alternatively, the ν i represents unobserved family resources or parenting style that influences the development of overweight and obesity. ...
Over the past three decades, the U.S. economy experienced a sharp increase in the labor force participation of women, causing a similar increase in the demand for non-parental child care. Concurrent with these developments has been a dramatic rise in the prevalence of childhood obesity, prompting the question as to what extent the increase in child care utilization is responsible for the growth in obesity. This chapter examines the impact of various child care arrangements on school-age children's weight outcomes using panel data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). An advantage of the ECLS-K for our purposes is that it tracks children's child care arrangements between Kindergarten and the 5 th grade. Our fixed effects results suggest that non-parental child care arrangements are not strongly associated with children's weight outcomes. Our findings are robust to numerous sensitivity and sub-group analyses.
... These studies consistently find that childhood onset of externalizing problems such as conduct disorder or substance abuse are negatively associated with subsequent educational attainment, whereas the evidence is more variable for internalizing problems such as depression and anxiety [7,585960. Other studies also find that, among secondary school students, depression and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder are negatively associated with academic measures such as grade point average [61] and verbal test scores [59,61]. Taking into account the adverse educational outcomes associated with adolescent mental disorders, it seems plausible that increased treatment of these illnesses has led to larger numbers of youth with mental disorders attending college. ...
... These studies consistently find that childhood onset of externalizing problems such as conduct disorder or substance abuse are negatively associated with subsequent educational attainment, whereas the evidence is more variable for internalizing problems such as depression and anxiety [7,585960. Other studies also find that, among secondary school students, depression and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder are negatively associated with academic measures such as grade point average [61] and verbal test scores [59,61]. Taking into account the adverse educational outcomes associated with adolescent mental disorders, it seems plausible that increased treatment of these illnesses has led to larger numbers of youth with mental disorders attending college. ...
Mental disorders are as prevalent among college students as same-aged non-students, and these disorders appear to be increasing in number and severity. The purpose of this report is to review the research literature on college student mental health, while also drawing comparisons to the parallel literature on the broader adolescent and young adult populations.
... If a mother has copies of the ε2 and ε4 allele of the APOE gene, the latter of which is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's disease, then it is a (quasi-)random matter whether the child inherits the ε2 or ε4 copy, and siblings have an equal chance of being concordant or discordant. Consequently, for example, if particular genes could be identified that have strong effects on lifetime health but did not affect socioeconomic status (SES)— except indirectly, through whatever their effect on health—then variation on these genes among full siblings potentially offers a powerful approach to disentangling the effect of health on SES from the effect of SES on health (Ding et al. 2006; see also Benjamin et al. 2007, p. 305; Ebrahim & Davey Smith 2008 ). Comparing genetically discordant full siblings using this design also eliminates the possibility of confounders from consequences of parental genes on parental health and subsequent parental SES (Fletcher & Lehrer 2008 ). ...
Social science and genetic science still have fairly little engagement with one another, but the continued swift development of genetic science has certainly gained social scientists’ attention. First, some social scientists are incorporating techniques from quantitative and molecular genetics into their work. Genetic data are increasingly recognized as providing valuable leverage even for research animated by strict interest in social environmental causes. Second, social scientists have been interested in understanding aspects of genetic science as a social phenomenon. This literature identifies possible noxious effects of uncritical public acceptance of genetic science, although how consistent these speculations are with public opinion and other available data is less clear. Because public understanding of genetics can influence behavior and social policies in ways that affect the ultimate causal potency of genes themselves, adequately theorizing genes as causes requires integration of these two lines of inquiry.
... Variations in the coding of alleles are believed to be linked to some variations in human outcomes. There are many previous studies that associate certain types of individual behaviors with these variations (See Caspi et al., 2002;Rowe et al., 1998;Ding et al., 2006;Guo and Tong, 2006). These studies have guided us in incorporating genetic markers in our empirical analyses. ...
Child maltreatment is a major social problem. This study measures the effects of child maltreatment on crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focus on crime because it is one of the most costly potential outcomes of maltreatment. Our work addresses many limitations of the existing literature. First, we use a large national sample, and investigate different types of abuse in a similar framework. Second, we pay careful attention to controlling for possible confounding factors by comparing male twins and by controlling for differences in genetic endowments that have been linked to aggression and risk taking behaviors. We find that maltreatment greatly increases the probability of engaging in crime and that programs to reduce maltreatment would be cost-effective.
... Department of Education, 2006), but fewer than 50 percent of college enrollees graduate (Knapp, 2007), and this proportion is 12-18 percent lower among students who are black, Hispanic, American-Indian, or lower socioeconomic status (Horn & Berger, 2004). Previous studies have considered a range of factors—such as financial aid (Dynarski, 1999) and academic and social involvement (Tinto, 1998)—that affect remaining in and completing college. Another important factor may be mental health. ...
... One of these two studies also examines longer-term effects of ADHD, and finds no evidence of an effect on total years of education and college attendance (Fletcher & Wolfe, 2007). Second, researchers have used specific genotypes as instruments for mental health, positing that variation in genotypes affects mental health but does not directly affect educational attainment (Ding et al., 2007; Fletcher & Lehrer, 2008). The two studies are suggestive of effects of mental health on academic outcomes, but come to somewhat different conclusions. ...
Mental health problems represent a potentially important but relatively unexplored factor in explaining human capital accumulation during college. We conduct the first study, to our knowledge, of how mental health predicts academic success during college in a random longitudinal sample of students. We find that depression is a significant predictor of lower GPA and higher probability of dropping out, particularly among students who also have a positive screen for an anxiety disorder. In within-person estimates using our longitudinal sample, we find again that co-occurring depression and anxiety are associated with lower GPA, and we find that symptoms of eating disorders are also associated with lower GPA. This descriptive study suggests potentially large economic returns from programs to prevent and treat mental health problems among college students, and highlights the policy relevance of evaluating the impact of such programs on academic outcomes using randomized trials.
... Specifically, we use genotypes as instruments for phenotypes and behaviors. Two other economic paper use genetic information as instrumental variables to study how health affects education (Ding et al., 2006; Fletcher and Lehrer, 2008). Certain genes are known to be related to obesity and substance use. ...
