Child height, health and human capital: evidence using genetic markers

Stephanie von Hinke, George Smith, Debbie Lawlor, Carol Propper and Frank Windmeijer

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Height has long been recognised as associated with better outcomes: the question is whether this association is causal. We use children’s genetic variants as instrumental variables (IV) to deal with possible unobserved confounders and examine the effect of child and adolescent height on a wide range of outcomes: academic performance, IQ, self-esteem, symptoms related to depression and behavioural problems, including hyperactivity, emotional, conduct and peer problems. OLS findings show that taller children have higher IQ scores, perform better in school tests, and are less likely to have emotional or peer problems. The IV results differ. They show that taller children have better cognitive performance but, in contrast to the OLS, indicate that taller children are more likely to have behavioural problems. The magnitude of these IV estimates is large. For example, the effect of one standard deviation increase in height on IQ is comparable to the IQ difference for children born approximately 6 months apart within the same school year, while the increase in hyperactivity is comparable to the raw difference in hyperactivity between boys and girls.

Keywords: Child and adolescent height; human capital; mental health; behavioural outcomes; instrumental variables; Mendelian randomization; genetic variants; ALSPAC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2010-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-hea, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2010/wp245.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2010/wp245.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2010/wp245.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Child height, health and human capital: Evidence using genetic markers (2013)
Working Paper: Child height, health and human capital: evidence using genetic markers (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:10/245

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().