 Obesity and skill attainment in early childhoodJohn Cawley and Katharina Spiess () Economics & Human Biology, 2008, vol. 6, issue 3, 388-397 Abstract: This paper investigates the association between obesity and skill attainment in early childhood (aged 2-3 years). Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study are used to estimate models of developmental functioning in four critical areas (verbal skills, activities of daily living, motor skills, and social skills) as a function of various measures of weight (including body mass index and obesity) controlling for a rich set of child, parent, and family characteristics. The findings indicate that, among boys, obesity is associated with reduced verbal skills, social skills, motor skills, and activities of daily living. Among girls, obesity is associated with reduced verbal skills. Further investigations show that the correlations exist even for those preschool children who spend no time in day care, which implies that the correlations cannot be due solely to discrimination by teachers, classmates, or day care providers. Keywords: Obesity; Skill; formation; Human; capital; Children; Child; development; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:6:y:2008:i:3:p:388-397 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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