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Does education reduce the probability of being overweight?

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Author Info
Dinand Webbink ()
Nicholas G. Martin
Peter M. Visscher
Abstract

The prevalence of overweight and obesity is growing rapidly in many countries. Education policies might be important for reducing this increase. This paper analyses the causal effect of education on the probability of being overweight by using longitudinal data of Australian identical twins. The data include self-reported and clinical measures of body size. Our crosssectional estimates confirm the well-known negative association between education and the probability of being overweight. For men we find that education also reduces the probability of being overweight within pairs of identical twins. The estimated effect of education on overweight status increases with age. Remarkably, for women we find no negative effect of education on body size when fixed family effects are taken into account. Identical twin sisters that differ in educational attainment do not systematically differ in body size. This finding is robust to differences in employment and number of children.

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File URL: http://www.cpb.nl/eng/pub/cpbreeksen/discussie/102/disc102.pdf
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Paper provided by CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis in its series CPB Discussion Papers with number 102.

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Date of creation: Apr 2008
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Handle: RePEc:cpb:discus:102

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Related research
Keywords: education; overweight; body size;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Production
I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General

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