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Title: Child Mental Health and Human Capital Accumulation: The Case of ADHD
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Currie, Janet
Stabile, Mark
Child Mental Health and Human Capital Accumulation: The Case of ADHD
Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of California - Los Angeles, July 2004.
Also: http://www.econ.ucla.edu/people/papers/currie/more/mental.pdf
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79
Publisher: Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Attention/Attention Deficit; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Canada, Canadian; Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY); Child Health; Children, Mental Health; Cross-national Analysis; Family Income; Head Start; Job Aspirations; Labor Market Outcomes; Preschool Children; Rotter Scale (see Locus of Control); School Progress; Sociability/Socialization/Social Interaction

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We examine U.S. and Canadian children with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the most common child mental health problem. Our work offers a number of innovations. First we use large national samples and focus on an ADHD screener that was administered to all children rather than on small samples of diagnosed cases. Second, we address omitted variables bias by estimating sibling-fixed effects models as well as instrumenting for possible measurement error in reports of ADHD symptoms. Third, we examine a range of outcomes and compare the effects of ADHD to the effects of physical health conditions. Fourth, we ask how the effects of ADHD and treatment for ADHD are mediated by income.

We find that ADHD has large negative effects on test scores and schooling attainment and the effects are much worse than those of physical health problems. The results are qualitatively similar in the U.S. and Canada, and are robust to many changes in specification. The test scores of higher income children suffer as much from ADHD as those of lower income children, though high income children are less likely to be retained in grade. Surprisingly, there appears to be little effect of income on the probability of treatment conditional on hyperactivity scores. A third finding is that even children with relatively low levels of symptoms suffer negative effects. The severity of the effects and the pervasiveness of the symptoms suggest that efforts to find better ways to teach the relatively small number of children diagnosed with ADHD could have a larger payoff in terms of improving the academic outcomes of large numbers of children with milder symptoms.

Bibliography Citation
Currie, Janet and Mark Stabile. "Child Mental Health and Human Capital Accumulation: The Case of ADHD." Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of California - Los Angeles, July 2004.