Duke 2008 | ASHE | Equity and Efficiency in Health and Healthcare

Research has consistently found a strong positive correlation between education and health. One important dimension of health is obesity; obesity is also of particular interest lately because it has doubled in the U.S. in the past twenty years. This session offers three research papers that tackle interesting questions regarding the interaction of obesity and education.

Timothy Classen will present research that examines whether the influence of adolescent obesity on education accumulation has changed over time as the proportion of obese adolescents has increased substantially over the previous three decades. The results in this project provide insight into the influence of obesity on education accumulation following dramatic changes in the proportion of adolescent peers with weight problems.

Future research in health economics will likely exploit genetic data to better understand individuals' predispositions to specific conditions and health behaviors. Edward Norton will present groundbreaking research in this area (joint with Euna Han) that uses variation in genotype (alleles for genes associated with satiation and therefore diet) as instruments for obesity in order to measure the causal impact of obesity on educational attainment.

Finally, Jeremy Bray will present research (collaborative with Eric Finkelstein and Justin Trogdon) on the link between obesity and educational attainment. The authors note that obesity is associated with worse labor market outcomes and hypothesize that farsighted youths who are obese will find a lower level of educational attainment to be optimal. A variety of methods are used to account for unobserved heterogeneity, and the empirical results are consistent with the authors' hypothesis.

Perspective on these papers will be provided by a set of discussants with considerable experience researching the economics of obesity: Chris Auld, Lisa Powell, and John Cawley.