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Author: Benson, Rebecca Irene
Resulting in 3 citations.
1. Benson, Rebecca Irene
Like Mother, Like Daughter? Maternal Education and BMI
Presented: Washington DC, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, March-April 2016
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); College Graduates; High School Completion/Graduates; Mothers and Daughters; Mothers, Education

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Adults with highly educated parents tend to have lower BMI than their peers with less highly educated parents, but selection and causation are both plausible explanations. I estimate the causal effect by using mothers' BMI as a counterfactual for the BMI of their daughters using data from the NLSY79 and NLSY79 Young Adults. I fit multilevel models of observations nested within daughters nested within mothers, using daughters' BMI and the difference between mothers' and daughters' BMI at the same age as dependent variables. Daughters of college graduates have lower BMI than daughters of high school graduates, but there is no difference in their departure from their mothers' BMI. Daughters of high school non-graduates have the same BMI as the daughters of high school graduates but exceed their mothers' BMI less. These findings suggest the relationship between parental education and BMI is due to selection rather than causal effects of education.
Bibliography Citation
Benson, Rebecca Irene. "Like Mother, Like Daughter? Maternal Education and BMI." Presented: Washington DC, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, March-April 2016.
2. Benson, Rebecca Irene
Targeting Education to Reduce Obesity: At What Life Stages Are Interventions Effective?
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, 2015
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: University of Texas at Austin
Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Education; Educational Attainment; Life Course; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Obesity

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Obesity is a serious policy problem, contributing an estimated $113.9b to medical expenditures in the US. Like many health outcomes, obesity is not distributed at random in the population but is concentrated amongst the less educated. Given this, many have suggested that if more people were to become highly educated, the obesity epidemic might be curtailed. However, this assumes that the association between education and obesity is a causal one, which is not necessarily the case. Moreover, previous research in lifecourse epidemiology suggests that education may occur too late in the lifecourse to have any effect on health trajectory. I perform three empirical studies to examine whether there is a plausibly causal relationship between education and body weight, and examine whether there is a point at which it is too late to alter body weight trajectories using education. All three studies use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), a complex random sample of the US civilian population aged 14-22 in 1978 and followed for more than three decades. In the first study, a cross-sectional regression finds a relationship between education and BMI. I use fixed effects models with individual slopes to test whether gaining a qualification leads to a change in BMI while controlling for individual heterogeneity, and find there is no effect. In study two, I consider the effects of education completed "on-time" with education completed "late." Fixed effects models show that women who earn bachelor's degrees on time benefit from lower BMI, but there is no benefit for late degrees or other qualifications and men do not similarly benefit. The third study stratifies the analysis by early-life circumstances and finds that in a cross-sectional analysis at age 45 only the most advantaged strata benefited from having earned a bachelor's degree. In fixed effects models, gaining a degree did not lead to a change in BMI for any group. Collectively, these findings ca st doubt on education's viability as a policy tool to address obesity, and suggest that at some point in the lifecourse it is too late to alter BMI trajectories by improving socio-economic status.
Bibliography Citation
Benson, Rebecca Irene. Targeting Education to Reduce Obesity: At What Life Stages Are Interventions Effective? Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, 2015.
3. Benson, Rebecca Irene
von Hippel, Paul
Lynch, Jamie L.
Does More Education Cause Lower BMI, or Do Lower-BMI Individuals Become More Educated? Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979
Social Science and Medicine 211 (August 2018): 370-377.
Also: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953617301971
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Elsevier
Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Educational Attainment; Gender Differences; Obesity

More educated adults have lower average body mass index (BMI). This may be due to selection, if adolescents with lower BMI attain higher levels of education, or it may be due to causation, if higher educational attainment reduces BMI gain in adulthood. We test for selection and causation in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, which has followed a representative US cohort from age 14-22 in 1979 through age 47-55 in 2012. Using ordinal logistic regression, we test the selection hypothesis that high-overweight and obese adolescents were less likely to earn high school diplomas and bachelor's degrees. Then, controlling for selection with individual fixed effects, we estimate the causal effect of degree completion on BMI and obesity status. Among 18-year-old women, but not among men, being overweight or obese predicts lower odds of attaining higher levels of education. Higher education at age 47-48 is associated with lower BMI, but 70-90% of the association is due to selection. Net of selection, a bachelor's degree predicts less than a 1 kg reduction in body weight, and a high school credential does not reduce BMI. At midlife, selection accounts for almost all of the education gradient in women's BMI.
Bibliography Citation
Benson, Rebecca Irene, Paul von Hippel and Jamie L. Lynch. "Does More Education Cause Lower BMI, or Do Lower-BMI Individuals Become More Educated? Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979." Social Science and Medicine 211 (August 2018): 370-377.