Bodyweight and Academic Performance in High School
- Presenter:
Chair: Glenn Blomquist; Discussant: Alison Evans Cuellar Tue June 6, 2006 8:00-9:30 Room 325
Although childhood obesity has become a major public health issue in the U.S., little evidence exists regarding the impact of being overweight on academic performance. This paper accordingly examines the relationship between bodyweight and grades, using data on high school students in the 2001 and 2003 Youth Risk Behavior Surveys. We isolate a causal effect of bodyweight by specifying an instrumental variable model in which indicators of self-assessed weight relative to the ideal serve as instruments for actual weight. To control for likely sources of deviations between the instruments and actual bodyweight, we also include proxies for time preference and self-esteem. Empirically, our identification strategy works quite well for boys: extremely large partial correlations between the instruments and observed weight produce standard errors sufficiently small to allow for precise inferences, and little heterogeneity with residuals from the academic performance equations is evident. Estimates indicate that additional pounds, being overweight and obesity each reduce grades by a significant amount that exceeds the corresponding OLS effect. Results are similar for girls, though the validity of our procedure is suspect in some specifications.
