Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/18253.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Estimating the Effects of Friendship Networks on Health Behaviors of Adolescents

Author

Listed:
  • Jason M. Fletcher
  • Stephen L. Ross
Abstract
This paper estimates the effects of friends' health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends' health behaviors is identified by comparing similar individuals who have the same friendship opportunities because they attend the same school and make similar friendship choices, under the assumption that the friendship choice reveals information about an individual's unobservables. We combine this identification strategy with a cross-cohort, within school design so that the model is identified based on across grade differences in the clustering of health behaviors within specific friendship patterns. Finally, we use the estimated information on correlated unobservables to examine longitudinal data on the on-set of health behaviors, where the opportunity for reverse causality should be minimal. Our estimates for both behavior and on-set are very robust to bias from correlated unobservables.

Suggested Citation

  • Jason M. Fletcher & Stephen L. Ross, 2012. "Estimating the Effects of Friendship Networks on Health Behaviors of Adolescents," NBER Working Papers 18253, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18253
    Note: EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18253.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fletcher, Jason M. & Ross, Stephen L. & Zhang, Yuxiu, 2020. "The consequences of friendships: Evidence on the effect of social relationships in school on academic achievement," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    2. Aliaksandr Amialchuk & Onur Sapci, 2022. "The long‐term health effects of initiating smoking in adolescence: Evidence from a national longitudinal survey," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(4), pages 597-613, April.
    3. Bet Caeyers & Marcel Fafchamps, 2016. "Exclusion Bias in the Estimation of Peer Effects," NBER Working Papers 22565, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Nirav Mehta & Ralph Stinebrickner & Todd Stinebrickner, 2019. "Time‐Use And Academic Peer Effects In College," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 57(1), pages 162-171, January.
    5. Topa, Giorgio & Zenou, Yves, 2015. "Neighborhood and Network Effects," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 561-624, Elsevier.
    6. Jason M. Fletcher & Stephen L. Ross & Yuxiu Zhang, 2013. "The Determinants and Consequences of Friendship Composition," Working papers 2013-31, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics.
    7. Bet Caeyers, 2014. "Exclusion bias in empirical social interaction models: causes, consequences and solutions," CSAE Working Paper Series 2014-05, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    8. Landini, Fabio & Montinari, Natalia & Pin, Paolo & Piovesan, Marco, 2016. "Friendship network in the classroom: Parents bias on peer effects," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 56-73.
    9. Dinarte Diaz, Lelys, 2024. "Peer Effects on Violence: Experimental Evidence from El Salvador," IZA Discussion Papers 16830, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    10. Stephen Billings & David Deming & Stephen L. Ross, 2016. "Partners in Crime: Schools, Neighborhoods and the Formation of Criminal Networks," Working Papers 2016-006, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    11. Wang, Muwen, 2023. "Opposite-gender friendships and learning performance of students: Evidence from China," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    12. Lelys Dinarte-Diaz, 2024. "Peer Effects on Violence: Experimental Evidence from El Salvador," CESifo Working Paper Series 10975, CESifo.
    13. Chen, Xi & Sahn, David E. & Zhang, Xiaobo, 2018. "Social Interactions and Stigmatized Behavior: "Donating" Blood Plasma in Rural China," IZA Discussion Papers 11413, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. repec:oxf:wpaper:wps/2014-05 is not listed on IDEAS

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18253. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.