@article{a971ea32ad66440d921767450c4ebb5a,
title = "Genetic risks, adolescent health, and schooling attainment",
abstract = "We provide new evidence on the effect of adolescent health behaviors/outcomes (obesity, depression, smoking, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]) on schooling attainment using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We take two different approaches to deal with omitted variable bias and reverse causality. Our first approach attends to the issue of reverse causality by estimating the effect of health polygenic scores (PGSs) on schooling. Second, we estimate the effect of adolescent health using sibling fixed-effects models that control for unmeasured genetic and family factors shared by siblings. We use the PGSs as additional controls in the sibling fixed-effects models to reduce concerns about residual confounding from sibling-specific genetic differences. We find consistent evidence across both approaches that being genetically predisposed to smoking and smoking regularly in adolescence reduces schooling attainment. Estimates for depression are more imprecise, but also suggest that a high genetic risk of depression and adolescent depression reduce schooling attainment. We find mixed evidence for ADHD. Our estimates suggest that having a high genetic risk for ADHD reduces grades of schooling, but we do not find any statistically significant negative effects of ADHD. Finally, we find no consistent evidence for a detrimental effect of obesity on schooling attainment.",
keywords = "adolescent health, education, polygenic scores, schooling attainment",
author = "Vikesh Amin and Behrman, {Jere R.} and Fletcher, {Jason M.} and Flores, {Carlos A.} and Alfonso Flores-Lagunes and Kohler, {Hans Peter}",
note = "Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Daniel Eisenberg and Petri B{\"o}ckerman for useful comments and Christian Failla for research assistance. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris, designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01‐HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website ( http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth ). No direct support was received from grant P01‐HD31921 for this analysis. The authors acknowledge research funding from NIH grant number 1R01HD094011‐01. Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Daniel Eisenberg and Petri B?ckerman for useful comments and Christian Failla for research assistance. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris, designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. The authors acknowledge research funding from NIH grant number 1R01HD094011-01. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.",
year = "2021",
month = nov,
doi = "10.1002/hec.4421",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "30",
pages = "2905--2920",
journal = "Health Economics (United Kingdom)",
issn = "1057-9230",
publisher = "John Wiley and Sons Ltd",
number = "11",
}