We estimate the effect of BMI on mental health for young adults and elderly individuals using data from the National … Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Health & Retirement Study. To tackle confounding due to unobserved factors, we … attainment) that may invalidate this IV. We find a large statistically significant effect of BMI on mental health for the elderly …

It is well-established that (1) there is a large genetic component to mental health, and (2) higher schooling … attainment is associated with better mental health. Given these two observations, we test the hypothesis that schooling may … attenuate the genetic predisposition to poor mental health. Specifically, we estimate associations between a polygenic score …