Academic Performance and Childhood Misnourishment: A Quantile Approach

Abstract

This study assesses the impact of childhood BMI (underweight and overweight) on academic performance using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class. The modeling framework is innovative in that it focuses primarily on (i) controlling for potential endogeneity of BMI on academic performance (as both may be driven by other household characteristics), and (ii) examining marginal effects for the tails of the performance distribution (i.e., those lower performing students). We use Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression to address these two issues. We found that a child BMI had differential impacts across the performance distribution: it affected lower performing students more and may contribute to the achievement gap.