The literature that examines the relationship between child or adolescent Body Mass Index (BMI) and academic attainment generally finds mixed results. This may be due to the use of different data sets, conditioning variables, or methodologies: studies either use an individual fixed effects (FE)...

Height has long been recognized as being associated with better outcomes: the question is whether this association is causal. We use children's genetic variants as instrumental variables to deal with possible unobserved confounders and examine the effect of child/adolescent height on a wide...

The use of genetic markers as instrumental variables (IV) is receiving increasing attention from economists. This paper examines the conditions that need to be met for genetic variants to be used as instruments. We combine the IV literature with that from genetic epidemiology, with an...