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Title: The Effects of Family Structure and Parental Resources on Child Body Weight
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Bao, Yanjun |
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The Effects of Family Structure and Parental Resources on Child Body Weight Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago, May 2007. Also: http://www.uic.edu/cba/cba-depts/economics/job_candidate.html Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Child Health; Family Structure; Hispanics; Household Composition; Obesity; Weight Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Using a panel of children aged 2-17 years between 1986 and 2002 from the merged mother-child files from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, this study examines the effects of family structure on child Body Mass Index (BMI) and obesity. Compared with children in other types of family structure, children living with married mothers have lower BMI and reduced probabilities of obesity. The reductions in BMI and obesity probability are larger as mothers are married for an increased number of years. The findings persist after controlling for a rich set of explanatory variables including family income and maternal work status, and in first-difference estimations that account for unobserved heterogeneity. The protective effect of living with married mothers against higher BMI and obesity is found for girls but not boys, for non-Hispanic black children but not non-Hispanic white children or Hispanic children. For the average child, relative to having a mother who is never married, having a mother who is married for all the years during the child's lifetime reduces BMI by 0.38 units and the obesity probability by 3.48 percentage points. The same exercises result in reductions in obesity probabilities of 4.56 and 6.16 percentage points respectively for girls and for non-Hispanic black children. |
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Bibliography Citation
Bao, Yanjun. The Effects of Family Structure and Parental Resources on Child Body Weight. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago, May 2007.. |