Weight Gain in Adolescents and Their Peers

Timothy J. Halliday and Sally Kwak ()
Additional contact information
Sally Kwak: University of Hawaii at Manoa

No 3610, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: Despite the urgent public health implications, relatively little is yet known about the effect of peers on adolescent weight gain. We describe trends and features of adolescent BMI in a nationally representative dataset and document correlations in weight gain among peers. We find strong correlations between own body mass index (BMI) and peers’ BMI’s. Though the correlations are especially strong in the upper ends of the BMI distribution, the relationship is smooth and holds over almost the entire range of adolescent BMI. Furthermore, the results are robust to the inclusion of school fixed effects and basic controls for other confounding factors such as race, sex, and age. Some recent research in this area asks whether or not adolescent weight gain is caused by peers. We discuss the econometric difficulties in plausibly estimating such effects. Our results do not rule out the existence of these types of social network effects.

Keywords: obesity; peer effects; adolescent health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-soc
Date: 2008-07
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3610.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Weight gain in adolescents and their peers (2009)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3610

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().