Child Mental Health and Human Capital Accumulation: The Case of ADHD

Janet Currie () and Mark Stabile

No 10435, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: One in five U.S. youngsters has a mental disorder, but we know little about the effects of these disorders on outcomes. We examine U.S. and Canadian children with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the most common child mental health problem. Our innovations include the use of large nationally representative samples of children, the use of questions administered to all children rather than focusing only on diagnosed cases, and the use of sibling fixed effects to control for omitted variables. We find large negative effects on test scores and schooling attainment suggesting that mental health conditions are a more important determinant of average outcomes than physical health conditions.

JEL-codes: I2 I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Date: 2004-04
Note: ED HE CH
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10435.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Journal Article: Child mental health and human capital accumulation: The case of ADHD (2006)
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:nbr:nberwo:10435

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10435
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().