TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kaestner, Robert
AU  - Grossman, Michael
AU  - Yarnoff, Benjamin
TI  - Effects of Weight on Adolescent Educational Attainment
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14994
PY  - 2009
Y2  - May 2009
DO  - 10.3386/w14994
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14994
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14994.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert Kaestner
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago
1307 East 60th Street (Room 3057)
Chicago, IL 60637
E-Mail: kaestner@uchicago.edu

Michael Grossman
National Bureau of Economic Research
5 Hanover Square, 16th Floor, Suite 1602
New York, NY 10004-2630
Tel: (646) 783-4407
E-Mail: mgrossman@gc.cuny.edu

Ben Yarnoff
Department of Economics
University of Illinois at Chicago
601 South Morgan Street
Chicago, IL 60607
E-Mail: byarno2@uic.edu
M1  - published as Robert Kaestner, Michael Grossman, Benjamin Yarnoff. "Effects of Weight on Adolescent Educational Attainment," in Michael Grossman and Naci H. Mocan, editors, "Economic Aspects of Obesity" University of Chicago Press (2011)

M3  - presented at "Economic Aspects of Obesity", November 10-11, 2008
AB  - In this paper, we investigate the association between weight and adolescent's educational attainment, as measured by highest grade attended, highest grade completed, and drop out status.  Data for the study came from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which contains a large, national sample of teens between the ages of 14 and 18.  We obtained estimates of the association between weight and educational attainment using several regression model specifications that controlled for a variety of observed characteristics.  Our results suggest that, in general, teens that are overweight or obese have levels of attainment that are about the same as teens with average weight.
ER  -