Within-family variation in obesity

Joseph Price and Jeffrey Swigert

Economics & Human Biology, 2012, vol. 10, issue 4, 333-339

Abstract: We use data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to document the degree to which childhood obesity varies among siblings. We find considerable differences in body weight between siblings with over half of the siblings differing by more than 20 age-specific percentiles in terms of the body mass index. Even among identical twins, there is an average BMI difference of 12 percentiles. This variation is important for the use of econometric approaches that involve sibling comparisons.

Keywords: Obesity; Siblings; Twins; Families (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X1200069X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ehbiol:v:10:y:2012:i:4:p:333-339

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2012.04.013

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
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().