 Age, socioeconomic status and obesity growthCharles Baum and Christopher Ruhm Journal of Health Economics, 2009, vol. 28, issue 3, 635-648 Abstract: We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to examine how body weight changes with age for a cohort moving through early adulthood, to investigate how the age-obesity gradient differs with socioeconomic status (SES) and to study channels for these SES disparities. Our results show first that weight increases with age and is inversely related to SES during childhood. Second, the obesity gradient widens over the lifecycle, consistent with research on other health outcomes. Third, a substantial portion of the "effect" of early life conditions operates through race/ethnicity and the translation of advantaged family backgrounds during childhood into higher levels of subsequent education. By contrast, little of the SES gap appears to propagate through household composition, family income or health behaviors. Fourth, adult SES has independent effects after controlling for childhood status. Keywords: Obesity; Body; weight; Age; Socioeconomic; status (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:28:y:2009:i:3:p:635-648 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier |
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