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Estimating the Effects of Friendship Networks on Health Behaviors of Adolescents

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Author Info

  • Jason M. Fletcher

    (Yale University and Columbia University)

  • Stephen L. Ross

    (University of Connecticut)

Abstract

This paper estimates the effects of friends’ health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends’ health behaviors is identified by comparing similar individuals who have the same friendship opportunities because they attend the same school and make similar friendship choices, under the assumption that the friendship choice reveals information about an individual’s unobservables. We combine this identification strategy with a cross-cohort, within school design so that the model is identified based on across grade differences in the clustering of health behaviors within specific friendship patterns. Finally, we use the estimated information on correlated unobservables to examine longitudinal data on the on-set of health behaviors, where the opportunity for reverse causality should be minimal. Our estimates for both behavior and on-set are very robust to bias from correlated unobservables.

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File URL: http://www.econ.uconn.edu/working/2011-26.pdf
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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by University of Connecticut, Department of Economics in its series Working papers with number 2011-26.

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Length: 60 pages
Date of creation: Dec 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:uct:uconnp:2011-26

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Web page: http://www.econ.uconn.edu/
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Related research

Keywords: Peer Effects; Friendship Networks; Adolescent Health; Smoking; Drinking; Cohort Study;

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