The Effect of Adolescent Health on Educational Outcomes: Causal Evidence using ‘Genetic Lotteries’ between Siblings

Jason Fletcher and Steven Lehrer ()

CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: There has been growing interest in using specific genetic markers as instrumental variables in attempts to assess causal relationships between health status and socioeconomic outcomes, including human capital accumulation. In this paper we use a combination of family fixed effects and genetic marker instruments to show strong evidence that inattentive symptoms of ADHD in childhood and depressive symptoms as an adolescent are linked with years of completed schooling. Our estimates suggest that controlling for family fixed effects is important but these strategies cannot fully account for the endogeneity of poor mental heath. Finally, our results demonstrate that the presence of comorbid conditions present immense challenges for empirical studies that aim to estimate the impact of specific health conditions.

Keywords: Education Outcomes; Depression; Genetic Markers; ADHD; Obesity; Family Fixed Effects; and Instrumental Variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 I12 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2009-06-26, Revised 2009-06-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.clsrn.econ.ubc.ca/workingpapers/CLSRN%2 ... etic%20Lotteries.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
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:ubc:clssrn:clsrn_admin-2009-40

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vivian Tran ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).