Gender differences in the impact of weight status on academic performance: Evidence from adolescents in Taiwan

Yu-Lung Lu, Stephen Jui-Hsien Chou () and Eric Lin

Children and Youth Services Review, 2014, vol. 46, issue C, 300-314

Abstract: This paper takes advantage of the Taiwan Education Panel Survey data set to empirically evaluate whether a student's academic performance, measured by his or her test score, is affected by the body weight status of the student. We show that a student's weight status has no impact on his or her academic performance based on an OLS estimation; however, this result is likely to be incorrect due to the strong distributional and functional assumptions, and we further use the propensity score matching method to address this issue. If the entire sample is considered, we find that both overweight and underweight students perform worse than students of normal weight. If we separate the sample students into two groups according to their gender, we obtain different results for the different groups. While the male students tend to perform worse when they are either underweight or overweight, the adverse effect on the academic performance is larger for underweight students than for overweight students. By contrast, the academic performance of a female student will be affected only if she is overweight, but not if she is underweight. The policy implication that the government or the schools should have different plans for different gender groups can be drawn from our empirical finding.

Keywords: Academic performance; Overweight; Underweight; Body mass index (BMI); Propensity score matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I19 I21 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:46:y:2014:i:c:p:300-314

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2014.08.001

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