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Method: Participants were the 5347 men and women who responded to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY-79) 2012 survey. IQ was recorded with the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) when participants were aged 15 to 23 years of age. Self-reports on exercise (moderate activity, vigorous activity, and strength training), dietary, smoking, drinking, and oral health behaviours were recorded when participants were in middle age (mean age = 51.7 years). A series of regression analyses tested for an association between IQ in youth and the different health related behaviours in middle age, while adjusting for childhood socio-economic status (SES) and adult SES.

Conclusion: In the present study, a higher IQ in adolescence was associated with a number of healthier behaviours in middle age. In contrast to these results, a few associations were also identified between higher intelligence and behaviours that may or may not be linked with poor health (i.e. skipping meals and snacking between meals) and with behaviours that are known to be linked with poor health (i.e. drinking alcohol and the number of cigarettes smoked). To explore mechanisms of association, future studies could test for a range of health behaviours as potential mediators between IQ and morbidity or mortality in later life.

Methods and findings: We used data from four United States general youth population cohort studies: the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY-79), the NLSY-79 Children and Young Adult, the NLSY 1997 (NLSY-97), and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS); a total of 12,250 siblings from 5,602 households followed from adolescence up to age 62. We used random effects within-between (REWB) and residualized quantile regression (RQR) models to compare between- and within-family estimates of the association between adolescent cognitive ability and adult BMI (20 to 64 years). In REWB models, moving from the 25th to 75th percentile of adolescent cognitive ability was associated with −0.95 kg/m2 (95% CI = −1.21, −0.69) lower BMI between families. Adjusting for family socioeconomic position reduced the association to −0.61 kg/m2 (−0.90, −0.33). However, within families, the association was just −0.06 kg/m2 (−0.35, 0.23). This pattern of results was found across multiple specifications, including analyses conducted in separate cohorts, models examining age-differences in association, and in RQR models examining the association across the distribution of BMI. Limitations include the possibility that within-family estimates are biased due to measurement error of the exposure, confounding via non-shared factors, and carryover effects.

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Since the late 1970s, researchers find that an increasingly large percentage of the economically disadvantaged are women, a fact contributing to a severe gender gap in income attainment. Most research on poverty and gender inequality focuses on salaries and wages as the primary proxy for evaluating economic well-being. However, earned income fluctuates greatly and may not provide an accurate picture of the economic welfare of an individual over time. In contrast, wealth -- understood as the value of person's assets less their debts -- captures long-term economic security. I broaden current research on gender and family status inequalities by using wealth as a measure of economic welfare. My research explores the joint effects of gender, marital status, and parenthood on net worth of economic assets and portfolio behavior in order to understand whether in the United States the feminization of the disadvantaged and the pauperization of motherhood extend to wealth. Further, to gain greater insight into the parental gap in wealth inequality, I focus on the timing of fertility behavior, specifically examining the effects of teen parenthood, adult parenthood, and childlessness on adult wealth for young baby boomers, born between 1957 and 1964. My analyses are based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth between 1979 and 2000. I find that young baby boomers' marital status and parental status are very strong predictors of adult wealth. Overall, the discovered patterns suggest that married couples have much greater wealth accumulation than single adults. I find evidence of a minimal to moderate gender gap in wealth accumulation for single adults. Moreover, when I control for parenthood, I find strong evidence of a family gap in net worth and portfolio behavior for single men and women. Single mothers and fathers are economically disadvantaged in comparison to adults without children, with single mothers suffering the most severe economic penalties. In addition, young baby boomers that had a child during their teenage years experience great financial burdens, which in turn lead to large disadvantages in wealth accumulation, reflecting a strong parental gap between teen parents, adult parents, and those who never had a child.

In the United States, household wealth is unequally distributed. While facts about the distribution are readily available, less is known about the family dynamics that underlie this important component of inequality. An increasing number of households are headed by single females (both never married and divorced), and the number of single mothers among these households has grown in recent decades. This article explores differences in wealth in the US by marital status, gender, and parenting status. It focuses on young baby boomers, finding a minimal gender gap in the wealth of never-married people. However, when controlling for parenthood, strong evidence was found of a family gap in household wealth accumulation, with single mothers and fathers economically disadvantaged in comparison to adults without children. Yet, it was found that single mothers suffer the most severe economic penalties in household wealth accumulation.

In the third chapter, I investigate the partial identification bound for treatment effect in a dynamic setting. First, I develop the sharp partial identification bounds of dynamic treatment effect on conditional transition probabilities when the treatment is randomly assigned. Then I relax the randomization assumption and gives partial identification bounds, under a conditional mean independence assumption. Using MTR and MTS assumptions, this bound is further tightened. These bounds are used on estimating labor market return of college degree in a long term, with data from NLSY79.

Objective: This study aims to fill these gaps by testing a research framework that links the discriminatory experience during adolescence to an individual's health during mid-adulthood via self-esteem and risk behaviors at early adulthood.

Method: Structural equation modeling is applied to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort (N = 6478).

Results: The discriminatory experience during adolescence imposes an adverse impact on health during mid-adulthood even after accounting for other potential covariates, a detrimental effect lasting for over 30 years. In addition, while perceived discrimination reduces self-esteem at early adulthood, it affects only mental health during mid-adulthood, rather than general health. Finally, the discriminatory experience promotes risk behaviors at early adulthood and the risk behaviors subsequently compromise health during mid-adulthood.

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Results: Working long hours (e.g., 41-50, 51-60 and 60+ compared to 30-40 hours per week) was associated with a significantly elevated risk of chronic heart disease, non-skin cancer, arthritis, and diabetes. The observed effects were larger and more significant among women than among men.

Education is clearly linked to these employment processes. In high school, youths learn mainly general skills. These include not only hard skills such as literacy and numeracy, but soft skills such as punctuality, dependability, and following directions. Because of their youth, those seeking jobs just after high school may know less about the world of work and be less committed to a particular occupation. Likewise, employers of these youths have less information about their skills. Both employer and employee may look at entry-level jobs as a learning process by which each can evaluate the long-term potential of their "match." College graduates, on the other hand, invest more in specific skills and may acquire a greater knowledge of the job market within their field. They can match their interests to skills and reject potential career paths before entering the labor market. Employers of new college graduates have potentially greater knowledge of the particular skills of their new hires, and, because of the higher wages they must pay, more incentive to find a good match. For these reasons, matches between new college graduates and their employers may be expected to last longer than those between new high school graduates and employers. Youths who have left school without a high school degree are doubly disadvantaged; they lack both general and job-specific skills, and they face employers who have low expectations and little incentive to invest in their matches. Consequently, schooling choices may dictate the speed and ease of the school-to-work transition.

The expansions in Medicaid eligibility had intended and unintended consequences on several outcomes. First of these was on private health insurance. There was a possibility that near-poor individuals who initially had private coverage switched to Medicaid. Since this indicates only a shift in financing of care from private to public insurance, the consequence would be little or no change in health care utilization and health. In the first essay, I found that Medicaid expansions had no effect on privately covered individuals, but a large impact on those who were initially uninsured.

The second potential consequence of Medicaid expansions was on infant and child health outcomes. Even though expanded eligibility gave rise to a substantial increase in enrollment rates, the effectiveness of the public program was conditional on improving the health of infants and children. In the second essay, the effect of Medicaid on infant and child health has been extensively examined and only limited evidence has been found on Medicaid coverage improving health outcomes.

A third possible effect of the Medicaid expansions was on labor supply and welfare participation of female heads. Elimination of the link between the cash assistance program and Medicaid created new incentives in the labor markets for welfare recipients. The expected consequences were an increase in labor supply and reduction in welfare rolls. I analyzed this issue in the third essay and found very little evidence on the effect of Medicaid on labor supply and welfare participation for female heads.

Although the chi-square test value for the overall model fit of the final revised theoretical model is 882.7, with df = 454, p < 0.01, the ratio of the chi2/df is less than 2, indicating an acceptable fit. The fitness of the model to the sample is also supported by other fit indices, such as the GFI, CFI, and the NNFI. In this model, mother's alcohol use is associated with decreased family cohesion, and decreased family cohesion contributes to child's increased level of substance use/abuse. In addition, higher level of parental control/discipline is also associated with lower level of child's substance use/abuse, higher level of psychological well-being, and better school performance. The cross-validation also partially supports the external validity of the model. Early intervention aimed at promoting children's development may need to focus on how to promote closeness within the family and the quality of parenting rather than mother's own alcohol use behaviors.

Overall, most young baby boomers have experienced tremendous wealth mobility during the early part of their working lives. Compared to whites, blacks and Hispanics accumulate lower net worth because they start at lower wealth levels and experience less upward and more downward mobility over time.

Methods: We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (n = 7,644) and linear and logistic regressions to estimate the association between wealth and asthma. Changes in relative wealth following an asthma diagnosis and asthma status by increases in wealth through inheritance provide evidence on the causal direction.

Results: Asthma, particularly severe asthma, is associated with lower wealth. Wealth ranking does not change after a diagnosis of asthma, but inheriting a substantial sum is associated with a lower risk of severe asthma.

Conclusion: Wealth appears to protect against severe asthma, supporting the social causation model of disease.

The results indicate an inverse gradient in SSB consumption with respect to both income and wealth, controlling for education. However, we do not find evidence that changes in income and wealth correlate with changes in SSB intake. This finding suggests that SES influences the development of SSB consumption patterns, but changes in income and wealth generally do not alter them in adulthood.

Methods: We analyze data on 3,119 HS graduates and GED recipients in the NLSY79 who reported their health status at the age of 40. Logistic and ordinal regression models examine whether the three domains account for the GED health disadvantage.

Results: The GED health disadvantage was jointly explained by lower noncognitive skills, unhealthy behaviors, and adverse economic circumstances, with the latter being particularly important.

Conclusions: A multipronged approach may be necessary to reduce the GED health disadvantage, including improving noncognitive skills during K-12 education, expanding opportunities for employment and living wage for low-skill workers, and continued focus on improving health behaviors.

Adults are typically the focus of welfare policies and programs, even though children comprise a majority of public assistance recipients. In 1995, about two-thirds of those receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children each month were children.1 Moreover, key provisions in the most recent welfare legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), have implications for children.

Based on research findings from welfare-to-work program evaluations and from basic research on child development, we conclude that welfare reform can affect children in diverse ways. These effects will vary depending on state and local policies, family characteristics and risk status, patterns of maternal employment, and children's experiences in the home and in nonmaternal care settings.

Results: Both Black and US‐born Latino men reported more LYADC than White men. Further, membership in the persistently low and slow increase (vs. stable middle) early young adult income trajectory classes was associated with more LYADC. Multivariate analyses suggested that Black‐White disparities in LYADC were explained by early young adult income trajectories, whereas Latino‐White disparities in the same were explained by both early young adult income trajectories and early education. In controlled models, more LYADC predicted a higher likelihood of membership in the persistently low (vs. stable middle) income trajectory class in early midlife.

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The third paper explores the consequences of union dissolution, specifically cohabitation dissolution, on mental health outcomes, investigating the moderating effects of gender and parenthood. The findings suggest that gender differences in the association of cohabitation dissolution with psychological distress are contingent upon the types of psychological distress under consideration and also reveal that cohabitation dissolution intertwined with non-marital parenthood is harmful to mental health, especially for young women.

The second chapter concerns economics of fertility and investigates to what extent the observed correlation between adolescent fertility and poor maternal educational attainment is causal. Semi-parametric kernel matching estimator is applied to estimate the effects of teenage childbearing on schooling outcomes. The matching method estimates the conditional moments without imposing any functional form restrictions and attends directly to the common support condition. Using data from the NLSY-79, kernel matching estimates suggest that half of the cross-sectional educational gaps remains after controlling for individual and family covariates. The difference between matching estimates and regression-based estimates implies that part of the conditional difference in parametric models is due to the functional assumption. The robustness check following Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) reveals that a substantial amount of correlation is required within a parametric framework to make the negative effect of teen motherhood on educational attainment go away. Further evidence obtained by simulation-based nonparametric sensitivity analysis suggests that the matching estimates are quite robust with regard to a wide range of specifications of the simulated unobservables.

My first essay “Homeownership Achievement of Second Generation Immigrants Accounting for Social Network Effects” is the first one to study the homeownership of second generation immigrants. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, my paper identifies a lower propensity to own a house for native born individuals with immigrant parents compared with native-born individuals with native-born parents. I find that a metric to account for ethnic social networks (using the geographic clustering of Hispanics) can help explain the homeownership rate difference between these two groups. My estimation results show that networks of Hispanic homeowners increase the likelihood of homeownership for a Hispanic household, and the network effect is even larger for second generation Hispanics. This result suggests that the effect of knowledge spillover on homeownership decision results not only from the concentration of Spanish speakers, but also through other channels such as social activities which are rarely discussed in the literature.

The interaction of a household’s level of wealth and the down payment constraint has also been found to be among the most important influences on households’ homeownership decisions. The second essay “The Choice of Mortgage Down Payment Assistance and its Effect on Mortgage Outcomes” focuses on how households select into different mortgage down payment assistance programs (DPAs), and how this selection affects future loan performances. My study uses monthly panel data of the Ohio Housing Finance Agency’s (OHFA) Mortgage Revenue Bond (MRB) first- time home buyer program. Two forms of DPAs are available in this program. I explain how borrowers select into DPAs by using a two-step algorithm for dynamic games first proposed in Bajari, Benkard and Levin (2007). I first use a polychotomous choice model of DPA, and a survival model of the probability of default to generate hypothetical borrower choices. I then use the simulated data to recover parameters of a dynamic model of loan default, so that I can model borrowers’ choice of DPAs based on their expectations about future interest rates, house prices and income, and I then predict subsequent loan performances. Households that expect future income to increase should prefer assistance in order to smooth consumption, but the resulting higher monthly payment could lead to a higher risk of future delinquency and default. I am also able to examine whether borrowers selecting into DPAs are less risk averse, which leads to a higher probability of default. The policy question is how to improve loan performance, specifically, whether a new credit score requirement imposed in the end of 2009 will reduce future delinquency and default.

The third essay “The Neighborhood Effect of Loan Applications and Down Payment Assistance Usage” focuses on how neighbors’ decisions to obtain an OHFA MRB loan affect both households’ home mortgage loan applications and the usage of down payment assistance. Existing literature finds that borrowers with limited information about the mortgage market are more likely to select a subprime mortgage loan. By combining MRB loan data with Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data on mortgage applications, I test whether neighbors usage of MRB loans increase a household’s probability of receiving a MRB loan, and whether neighbors usage of DPA increases a household’s likelihood of using a DPA. Additionally, I control for lender influences on MRB loan and DPA usage, and compare it to neighbors’ influences. This study sheds light on two information channels of governmental loan programs: neighborhood knowledge spillovers and lender provided information. It also compares the relative importance of each channel, and thus could be used to explain why the government should provide easily accessible information to target areas.

Objective: To examine the associations of incarceration history and access to and receipt of care and the contribution of modifiable factors (educational attainment and health insurance coverage) to these associations.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Individuals with and without incarceration history were identified from the 2008 to 2018 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort. Analyses were conducted from October 2022 to December 2023.

Main Measures and Outcomes: Access to and receipt of health care were measured as self-reported having usual source of care and preventive service use, including physical examination, influenza shot, blood pressure check, blood cholesterol level check, blood glucose level check, dental check, and colorectal, breast, and cervical cancer screenings across multiple panels. To account for the longitudinal study design, we used the inverse probability weighting method with generalized estimating equations to evaluate associations of incarceration history and access to care. Separate multivariable models examining associations between incarceration history and receipt of each preventive service adjusted for sociodemographic factors; sequential models further adjusted for educational attainment and health insurance coverage to examine their contribution to the associations of incarceration history and access to and receipt of health care.

Results: A total of 7963 adults with 41 614 person-years of observation were included in this study; of these, 586 individuals (5.4%) had been incarcerated, with 2800 person-years of observation (4.9%). Compared with people without incarceration history, people with incarceration history had lower percentages of having a usual source of care or receiving preventive services, including physical examinations (69.6% vs 74.1%), blood pressure test (85.6% vs 91.6%), blood cholesterol level test (59.5% vs 72.2%), blood glucose level test (61.4% vs 69.4%), dental check up (51.1% vs 66.0%), and breast (55.0% vs 68.2%) and colorectal cancer screening (65.6% vs 70.3%). With additional adjustment for educational attainment and health insurance, the associations of incarceration history and access to care were attenuated for most measures and remained statistically significant for measures of having a usual source of care, blood cholesterol level test, and dental check up only.

Conclusions and Relevance: The results of this survey study suggest that incarceration history was associated with worse access to and receipt of health care. Educational attainment and health insurance may contribute to these associations. Efforts to improve access to education and health insurance coverage for people with an incarceration history might mitigate disparities in care.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors tested the main effect and mediating effects of entrepreneurs' life habits and self-esteem, respectively, using two longitudinal representative examples with 8,984 and 12,686 participants.

Findings: Results indicated that entrepreneurship significantly improved individuals' general lifetime health condition. Moreover, life habits (e.g. vigorous activities or sports, light activities, drinking habits and diet habits) and self-esteem significantly mediated the relationship between entrepreneurship and lifetime health. Entrepreneurs tended to have better health due to healthier life habits and higher self-esteem than salaried employees. In this paper, the authors also discussed theoretical and practical implications.

So, it is natural to ask whether the relationship between family structure and students' educational outcomes has changed from Cohort 79 to Cohort 97? If yes, what role does the change in family structure play in explaining the change in college completion rates? The first chapter of my dissertation answers these two questions. Chapter one of my dissertation documents the changing family circumstances of U.S. college students, and their relationship to students’ patterns of college graduation using the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). My empirical models of graduation probability show that students who come from those non-traditional families in the 1979 cohort are just 3 percentage points less likely to graduate from college than those who lived with both of their biological parents up to age 18. However, this gap increased to 9 percentage points for the 1997 cohort. A decomposition exercise based on the estimates demonstrates the share of the change in completion rates that the model attributes to the various observed explanatory variables, particularly to the change in family structure. Results indicate that students' characteristics and family background account for 45 percent of the change in graduation rate, with family structure accounting for 12 percent of the change in graduation rate. The central contribution of this analysis shows the importance of the family structure in explaining changes in college completion over the past 30 years in the United States.

Next, using the NLSY97, I observe that while studying in 4-year college, students from traditional families receive around 12000 dollars parental transfer in total, however, students from non-traditional families only receive 6000 dollars parental transfer in total. So, the goal of the second chapter is to understand whether parental transfer can explain some of the disadvantages students from nontraditional families have in college study. The results of probit model show that one thousand dollars increase in parental transfer is associated with a 2 percentage points increase in 4-year college enrollment. Moreover, one thousand dollars increase in the parental transfer is associated with a 0.5 percentage points increase in 4-year college graduation.

Chapter two develops a framework that nests both symmetric and asymmetric employer learning, and derives testable hypotheses on racial statistical discrimination under different processes of employer learning. Testing the model with data from the NLSY79, we find that employers statistically discriminate against black workers on the basis of both education and race in the high school market where learning appears to be mostly asymmetric. In the college market, employers directly observe most parts of the productivity of potential employees and learn very little over time.

In chapter three, we investigate how the process of employer learning and statistical discrimination varies over time and across employers. The comparison between the NLSY79 and the NLSY97 cohorts reveals that employer learning and statistical discrimination has became stronger over the past decades. Using the NLSY97 data, we identify three employer-specific characteristics that influencing employer learning and statistical discrimination, the supervisor-worker race match, supervisor's age, and firm size. Black high school graduates face weaker employer learning and statistical discrimination if they choose to work for a black supervisor, work for an old supervisor, or work in a firm of small size.

In the last chapter, we are interested in the associations between verbal and quantitative skills and individual earnings as well as the employer learning process of these two specific types of skills. There exist significant differences in both the labor market rewards and employer learning process of verbal and quantitative skills between high school and college graduates. Verbal skills are more important than quantitative skills for h igh school graduates, whereas college-educated workers benefit greatly from having high quantitative skills but little from having high verbal skills. In addition, employers directly learn verbal skills and continuously learn quantitative skills in the high school market, but almost perfectly observe quantitative skills in the college market.

DATA
Data are from the 1996, 2000, and 2001 waves of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services. MEPS is a large household survey of respondents drawn from the National Health Interview Survey and is designed to be nationally representative of the U.S. noninstitutionalized population. The survey consists of a series of five interviews over a two-and-a-half year period and records socioeconomic and health related information for each individual. While the multiple interview format of MEPS permits some limited longitudinal applications, child health variables relevant to this study are recorded only once a year. Therefore, the years are stacked and treated as a cross section sample. However, in light of modeling flexibilities offered by longitudinal analysis, comparison of MEPS to a separate longitudinal study is presented in the section on Results of Estimation. This longitudinal sample consists of 2,237 mothers drawn from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and is discussed in greater detail in the subsection NLSY Comparison.

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Setting: The US population in the year 2000.

Participants: 4817 US adults about age 40, representative of the US population.

Main outcome measures: Two outcomes were studied: self reported general health status, dichotomised as \"fair\" or \"poor\" compared with \"excellent\", \"very good\", or \"good\", and depression as measured by a score on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies depression instrument >16.

Results: State generosity was significantly associated with a reduced odds of reporting poor general health (OR 0.84, 95%CI: 0.71 to 0.99), and the county unemployment rate with reduced odds of reporting depression (OR 0.91, 95%CI: 0.84 to 0.97). The measure of income inequality is a significant risk factor for reporting poor general health (OR 1.98, CI: 1.08 to 3.62), controlling for all ecological and individual covariates. In stratified models, the index of social capital is associated with reduced odds of reporting poor general health among black people and Hispanics (OR 0.40, CI: 0.18 to 0.90), but not significant among white people. The inequality measure is significantly associated with reporting poor general health among white people (OR 2.60, CI: 1.22 to 5.56) but not black people and Hispanics.

Conclusions: The effect of income inequality on health may work through the influence of invidious social comparisons (particularly among white subjects) and (among black subjects and Latinos) through a reduction in social capital. Researchers may find it fruitful to recognise the cultural specificity of any such effects.

Objective: To test the independent effects of television viewing in children before age 3 years and at ages 3 to 5 years on several measures of cognitive outcomes at ages 6 and 7 years.

Design: Using data from a nationally representative data set, we regressed 4 measures of cognitive development at ages 6 and 7 years on television viewing before age 3 years and at ages 3 to 5 years, controlling for parental cognitive stimulation throughout early childhood, maternal education, and IQ.

Results: Before age 3 years, the children in this study watched an average of 2.2 hours per day; at ages 3 to 5 years, the daily average was 3.3 hours. Adjusted for the covariates mentioned earlier, each hour of average daily television viewing before age 3 years was associated with deleterious effects on the Peabody Individual Achievement Test Reading Recognition Scale of 0.31 points (95% confidence interval [CI], –0.61 to –0.01 points), on the Peabody Individual Achievement Test Reading Comprehension Scale of 0.58 points (95% CI, –0.94 to –0.21 points), and on the Memory for Digit Span assessment from the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children of –0.10 points (95% CI, –0.20 to 0 points). For the Reading Recognition Scale score only, a beneficial effect of television at ages 3 to 5 years was identified, with each hour associated with a 0.51-point improvement in the score (95% CI, 0.17 to 0.85 points).

Conclusions: There are modest adverse effects of television viewing before age 3 years on the subsequent cognitive development of children. These results suggest that greater adherence to the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines that children younger than 2 years not watch television is warranted.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether cognitive stimulation, emotional support, and television viewing at age 4 years are independently associated with being a bully at ages 6 through 11 years.

METHODS: We used multivariate logistic regression, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, to adjust for multiple confounding factors.

RESULTS: Parental cognitive stimulation and emotional support at age 4 years were each independently protective against bullying, with a significant odds ratio of 0.67 for both variables associated with a 1-SD increase (95% confidence interval, 0.54-0.82 for cognitive stimulation and 0.54-0.84 for emotional support). Each hour of television viewed per day at age 4 years was associated with a significant odds ratio of 1.06 (95% confidence interval, 1.02-1.11) for subsequent bullying. These findings persisted when we controlled for bullying behavior at age 4 years in a subsample of children for whom this measure was available.

CONCLUSION: The early home environment, including cognitive stimulation, emotional support, and exposure to television, has a significant impact on bullying in grade school.