School Disengagement, School-Age Births and High School Graduation: Evidence From Linked Administrative Records.

BACKGROUND: Failure to complete secondary education often results from a process of educational disengagement. Studies of teen childbearing and high school completion have not adequately accounted for the role of school disengagement prior to conception and may overestimate causal impacts of teen childbearing. METHODS: We link New York City birth and school records to study a cohort of 22,484 Black and Latina public school students. We measure disengagement with monthly absences from age 12 until the month before conception and identify five preconception attendance trajectories using group-based trajectory modeling. RESULTS: Preconception absenteeism can account for as much as half the deficit in high school completion associated with a teen birth. This finding is robust to statistical approaches, such as school fixed effects and inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that programs intending to increase educational attainment among young women should emphasize attendance and engagement, rather than primarily teenage pregnancy prevention.

Built environment as a risk factor for adult overweight and obesity: Evidence from a longitudinal geospatial analysis in Indonesia.

Indonesia has nearly doubled its urban population in the past three decades. In this period, the prevalence of overweight and obesity in Indonesia has also nearly doubled. We examined 1993-2014 panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to determine the extent to which the increase in one's built environment contributed to a corresponding increase in adult overweight and obesity during this period. We estimated longitudinal regression models for body mass index (BMI) and being overweight or obese using novel matched geospatial measures of built-up land area. Living in a more built-up area was associated with greater BMI and risk of being overweight or obese. The contribution of the built environment was estimated to be small but statistically significant even after accounting for individuals' initial BMI. We discuss the findings considering the evidence on nutritional and technological transitions affecting food consumption patterns and physical activity levels in urban and rural areas.

Estimating the educational consequences of teenage childbearing: Identification, heterogeneous effects and the value of biological relationship information.

Understanding the contribution of childbearing to social disadvantages of teenage mothers requires estimates that control for unobservables and generalize to teenage mothers. Sibling-differences and Instrumental Variables (IV) are common approaches to this end. Using the "Add Health" data, which oversampled siblings, and building on IV specifications from a widely-cited study, we compare various estimates of the consequences of teenage childbearing for schooling attainment. These IV-based estimates suggest moderate to large adverse impacts of teenage births (point estimates of -0.7 years of schooling or larger). However, the IV estimates are highly sensitive to choice of instrument and model specification. Estimates based on sibling and twin differences are consistently near zero-e.g., an estimated difference of -0.1 years between a teen mother and her biological full sister who did not have a teen birth-and are estimated with sufficient precision to exclude effects larger than -0.5 years. We review concerns about sibling methods and conclude that, despite their limitations, sibling estimates should be admitted along with other evidence on the consequences of teenage childbearing. Appreciation of the sensitivity of IV estimates and their other limitations would reinforce this conclusion.

Anchoring vignettes in the Health and Retirement Study: how do medical professionals and disability recipients characterize the severity of work limitations?

PURPOSE: Recent studies report systematic differences in how individuals categorize the severity of identical health and work limitation vignettes. We investigate how health professionals and disability recipients characterize the severity of work limitations and whether their reporting patterns are robust to demographic, education, and health characteristics. We use the results to illustrate the potential impact of reporting heterogeneity on the distribution of work disability estimated from self-reported categorical health and disability data. METHOD: Nationally representative data on anchoring disability vignettes from the 2004 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) are used to investigate how respondents with an occupation background in health and Social Security disability beneficiaries categorize work limitation vignettes. Using pain, cardiovascular health, and depression vignettes, we estimate generalized ordered probit models (N = 2,660 individuals or 39,681 person-vignette observations) that allow the severity thresholds to vary by respondent characteristics. RESULTS: We find that health professionals (excluding nurses) and disability recipients tend to classify identical work limitations as more severe compared to non-health professional non-disabled respondents. For disability recipients, the differences are most pronounced and particularly visible in the tails of the work limitations distribution. For health professionals, we observe smaller differences, affecting primarily the classification of mildly and moderately severe work limitations. The patterns for health professionals (excluding nurses) are robust to demographics, education, and health conditions. The greater likelihood of viewing the vignette person as more severely work limited observed among disability recipients is mostly explained by the fact that these respondents also tend to be in poorer health which itself predicts a more inclusive scale. CONCLUSIONS: Knowledge of reporting scales from health professionals and disabled individuals can benefit researchers in a broad range of applications in health and disability research. They may be useful as reference scales to evaluate disability survey data. Such knowledge may be beneficial when studying disability programs. Given the increasing availability of anchoring vignette data in surveys, this is a promising area for future evaluation research.

Racial differences in the influence of female adolescents' body size on dating and sex.

This paper investigates the effect of body size on dating and sexual experiences of white (non-Hispanic) and African American (non-Hispanic) female adolescents. Using data from Add-Health, we estimate the effects of obesity and BMI z-score on the probability of having been involved in a romantic relationship, having ever been touched in the genital area in a sexual way, and having ever engaged in sexual intercourse. We find that obese white teenage girls are less likely to have been in a romantic relationship compared to their non-obese counterparts. In addition, obese white girls are less likely to ever have had sex (intercourse) or to ever have been intimate. There are no systematic differences in relationship experiences and sexual behaviors between obese and non-obese black girls. Overall, the estimated relationships are very robust to common environmental influences at the school-level and to the inclusion of proxies for low self-esteem, attitudes toward sex and interviewer assessment of appearance and personality. Instrumental variables estimates and estimates from models with lagged weight status confirm the overall patterns.

Big and beautiful? Evidence of racial differences in the perceived attractiveness of obese females.

This paper investigates the relationships between body weight, race, and attractiveness in appearance and personality among adolescents. We study a sample of 5947 (non-Hispanic) white and black girls age 12 to 18 who were interviewed by a group of 338 interviewers. We find that overweight and obese white female adolescents are, respectively, 23% and 40% less likely, on average, to be perceived as physically attractive compared to normal-weight white girls. The physical appearance penalties are significantly smaller for overweight and obese black girls compared to white girls. These findings suggest that being overweight or obese is costly due to its negative impact on inner and outer perceived beauty, providing an explanation for the observed stigmatization of overweight and obesity among women in labor and relationship markets. The smaller beauty penalties for black girls above the normal-weight range suggest that the range of body sizes considered attractive may be wider for black females.

Should we get married? The effect of parents' marriage on out-of-wedlock children.

Using a representative sample of children all born to unwed parents drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and a potential outcome approach to account for self-selection into marriage, we investigate whether marriage after childbearing has a causal effect on early child development. Comparing children with similar background characteristics and parental mate-selection patterns who differ only in terms of whether their parents marry after childbirth, we find that marriage after childbirth significantly increases a child's early cognitive performance but there is no evidence that it affects child asthma risk or behavioral outcomes.

Weight-related behavior among adolescents: the role of peer effects.

PURPOSE: To investigate whether social interactions in friendship networks influence the following weight-related behaviors of adolescents: exercising regularly, playing an active sport, hours of TV/Video viewing, sleeping six or fewer hours, eating breakfast on weekdays, frequency of eating at fast food restaurants, eating five servings of fruits/vegetables daily, and consuming calorie-dense snacks. METHOD: Data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents are used to examine the association between peer and individual weight-related behaviors. Evidence from multivariate regression analysis controlling for an extensive list of individual- and family-level factors as well as school-level unobserved heterogeneity is obtained. RESULTS: We find a significant positive association between individuals' and friends' behaviors in terms of sports, exercise and fast food consumption. The estimated associations are robust to controls for individual- and family-level factors, unobserved heterogeneity at the school level and our attempts to account for non-random peer selection. CONCLUSIONS: The social transmission of weight-related behaviors is a viable explanation for the spread of obesity in friendship networks documented in recent research. Traditional weight reduction interventions may be fruitfully complemented with strategies that focus on harnessing peer support to modify behaviors.

From "overweight" to "about right": evidence of a generational shift in body weight norms.

In this article, we describe differences in the self-perception of weight status in the United States between the two most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) periods (1988-1994 and 1999-2004), and test the hypothesis that secular increases in adult mean BMI, adult obesity, and childhood obesity contributed to changes over time in weight perceptions. We find that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly lower on average in the more recent survey, for both women and men, controlling for objective weight status and other factors. Among women, the decline in the tendency to self-classify as overweight is concentrated in the 17-35 age range, and is more pronounced among women with normal BMI than those with overweight BMI. Among men, the shift away from feeling overweight is roughly equal across age groups. Overweight men exhibit a sharper decline in feeling overweight than normal weight men. Despite the declines in feeling overweight between surveys, weight misperception did not increase significantly for men and decreased by a sizable margin among women. We interpret the findings as evidence of a generational shift in social norms related to body weight. As a result, people may be less likely to desire weight loss than previously, limiting the effectiveness of public health campaigns aimed at weight reduction. On the other hand, there may be health benefits associated with improved body image.

Early Claiming of Social Security Benefits and Labor Supply Behavior of Older Americans.

The labor supply incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the United States Social Security Old Age benefits program are of growing importance as the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) increases to 67, and the labor force participation of Older Americans starts to increase. These incentives allow individuals who claim benefits before the NRA but continue to work, or return to the labor force, to increase their future rate of benefit pay by having benefits withheld. Since the adjustment of the benefit rate takes place only after the NRA is reached, benefits received before the NRA can become actuarially unfair for those who continue to work after claiming. Consistent with these incentives, estimates from bivariate models of the monthly labor force exit and claiming hazards using data from the Health and Retirement Study indicate that early claimers who do not withdraw from the labor force around the time they claim are increasingly likely to stay in the labor force.