Handedness, Health and Cognitive Development: Evidence from Children in the NLSY

David Johnston, Michael E. R. Nicholls (), Manisha Shah () and Michael Shields
Additional contact information
Michael E. R. Nicholls: Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research

No 4774, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and fitting family fixed-effects models of child health and cognitive development, we test if left-handed children do significantly worse than their right-handed counterparts. The health measures cover both physical and mental health, and the cognitive development test scores span (1) Memory, (2) Vocabulary, (3) Mathematics, (4) Reading and (5) Comprehension. We find that while left-handed children have a significantly higher probability of suffering an injury needing medical attention, there is no difference in their experience of illness or poor mental health. We also find that left-handed children have significantly lower cognitive development test scores than right-handed children for all areas of development with the exception of reading. Moreover, the left-handedness disadvantage is larger for boys than girls, and remains roughly constant as children grow older for most outcomes. We also find that the probability of a child being left-handed is not related to the socioeconomic characteristics of the family, such as income or maternal education. All these results tend to support a difference in brain functioning or neurological explanation for handedness differentials rather than one based on left-handed children living in a right-handed world.

Keywords: handedness; children; health; cognitive development; family fixed-effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2010-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-hap, nep-hea and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), 2013, 176 (4), 841-860

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4774.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Handedness, health and cognitive development: evidence from children in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (2013)
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:iza:izadps:dp4774

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 of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().