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Title: Growing Up Poor and Childhood Weight Problems
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Liu, Haiyong |
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Growing Up Poor and Childhood Weight Problems IRP Discussion Paper no. DP 1324-07, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, April 2007. Also: http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/dps/pdfs/dp132407.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), University of Wisconsin - Madison Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Child Health; Children, Poverty; Family Income; Obesity; Poverty; Weight Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper investigates the impact of growing up in poverty on the risk of childhood weight problems. Understanding the effect of family income on childhood weight problems is important, but has been hindered by the potential endogeneity of family income. We use matched mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to study the effects of growing up poor on risks of childhood overweight and underweight, accounting for unobserved heterogeneity that governs both children's weight and family income. We also estimate the impacts of family income on a child's weight measured by Body Mass Index (BMI) at different points in the conditional distribution of children's weight, using a two-stage residual inclusion least absolute deviation approach. Our results show that the mean effects of poverty exposure on risks of obesity and underweight are not statistically different from zero, accounting for the endogeneity of family income. More importantly we find that growing up poor increases a child's BMI by 14.7 percent if her BMI is at the 90th quantile of her cohort's BMI distribution and reduces her BMI by 12.7 percent if her BMI is at the 10th quantile. |
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Bibliography Citation
Liu, Haiyong. "Growing Up Poor and Childhood Weight Problems." IRP Discussion Paper no. DP 1324-07, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, April 2007. |