Are Employers Discriminating with Respect to Weight? European Evidence using Quantile Regression

Atella, Vincenzo; Pace, Noemi; Vuri, Daniela

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1120345

Cited by 35 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Economists have tried to address the endogeneity of body size in various ways in the literature. A number of recent studies have used the body size of a biological relative as an instrument (Cawley 2004;Burkhauser & Cawley 2008;Brunello & d'Hombres 2007;Kline & Tobias 2008;Atella et al 2008;Shimokawa 2008;Greve 2008;Trogdon et al 2008;Renna et al 2008;Davey Smith et al 2009;Lundborg et al 2010). Two recent studies have used specific genetic markers for obesity as instruments (Norton & Han 2008;Ding et al 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body Size, Skills, and Income: Evidence From 150,000 Teenage Siblings

2014

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Despite the widely described consequences of childhood and adolescent overweight and obesity the economics literature to date has almost exclusively focused on the relationship between body size and earnings among adults. We provide new evidence on the long-run labor market penalty of teenage overweight and obesity using unique and large-scale data on 150,000 male siblings from the Swedish military enlistment. Our empirical analysis provides four important results. First, we show for the first time that there is a large adult male labor market penalty for being overweight and obese as a teenager. Second, we show that this result can be replicated using data from the USA and the UK. Third, we show a strikingly strong within-family relationship between body size, on the one hand, and cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills, on the other hand. Fourth, we show that a large part of the estimated body size penalty reflects lower skill acquisition among overweight and obese teenagers. All of these results hint at the importance of policy combating early life obesity in order to reduce healthcare expenditures as well as poverty and inequalities later in life.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body Size, Skills, and Income: Evidence From 150,000 Teenage Siblings

2014

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“…Extensive evidence on the association between obesity and labour market outcomes (wages, labour market status and hours worked) of younger working-age adults has been collected in a number of countries including the US (Averett and Korenman, 1996;Burkhauser and Cawley, 2008;Cawley, 2000Cawley, , 2004Norton and Han, 2008;Pagan and Davila, 1997;Register and Williams, 1990;Sabia and Rees, 2012), China (Shimokawa, 2008), the UK (Lindeboom et al, 2010;Morris, 2006Morris, , 2007, Denmark (Greve, 2008), Finland (Johansson et al, 2009;Sarlio-Lahteenkorva and Lahelma, 1999), Germany (Bozoyan and Wolbring, 2011), Iceland (Asgeirsdottir, 2011), Sweden (Rooth, 2009) and Europe as a whole (Atella et al, 2008;Brunello and D'Hombres, 2007;Garcia and Quintana-Domeque, 2007;Villar and Quintana-Domeque, 2009). The results found in these studies generally indicate poorer labour market outcomes for obese women compared to their non-obese counterparts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body mass index, waist circumference and employment: Evidence from older Irish adults

Mosca

2013

Economics & Human Biology

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Data from the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing are used to examine the relationship between fatness and obesity and employment status among older Irish adults. Employment status is regressed on one of the following measures of fatness: BMI and waist circumference entered linearly as continuous variables and obesity as a categorical variable defined using both BMI and waist circumference. Controls for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, socioeconomic characteristics in childhood and physical, mental and behavioural health are also included. The regression results for women indicate that all measures of fatness are negatively associated with the probability of being employed and that the employment elasticity associated with waist circumference is larger than the elasticity associated with BMI. The results for men indicate that employment is not significantly associated with BMI and waist circumference when these are entered linearly in the regression, but it is significantly and negatively associated with obesity defined either using BMI or waist circumference as categorical variables. The results also indicate that the negative association between obesity and employment status is larger among women. For example, the probability of being employed for the obese category defined using BMI is around 8 percentage points lower for women and 5 percentage points lower for men.

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“…However, recent studies by Chernozhukov andHansen (Chernozhukov andHansen, 2008, 2013) propose an instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) approach that deals with both heterogeneity and endogeneity at the same time. Although the IVQR method has been applied in many research fields in economics (Atella, Pace, and Vuri, 2008;Autor, Houseman, and Kerr, 2012;Eren, 2009;Lamarche, 2011;Maynard and Qiu, 2009;Wehby, Murray, Castilla, Lopez-Camelo, and Ohsfeldt, 2009), it is relatively new to the returns to education literature. Only two studies implement IVQR to propose alternative instruments for schooling (Arabsheibani and Staneva, 2012) and to examine the inequality-reducing effect of education in China (Wang, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

Heterogeneous returns to education over the wage distribution: Who profits the most?

Balestra

Backes‐Gellner

2017

Labour Economics

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This study presents evidence of heterogeneous returns to education over the wage distribution. The authors use instrumental variable quantile regression and data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey to identify the causal link between education and wages at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages. The results provide evidence that there is no unique causal effect of schooling and that for each individual the effect may deviate from those extensively documented by ordinary least squares or two-stage least squares. In particular, while ordinary quantile regression estimates increasing returns in the quantile index, once the endogeneity of schooling is taken into account the authors instead observe higher returns at lower quantiles of the wage distribution. Interpreting the quantile index as a measure of unobserved ability, the results suggest that higher-ability individuals have higher wages, but the slope of their wage-education profile is flatter than that for lowerability individuals.

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Are Employers Discriminating with Respect to Weight? European Evidence using Quantile Regression

Cited by 35 publications

References 60 publications

Body Size, Skills, and Income: Evidence From 150,000 Teenage Siblings

Body Size, Skills, and Income: Evidence From 150,000 Teenage Siblings

Body mass index, waist circumference and employment: Evidence from older Irish adults

Heterogeneous returns to education over the wage distribution: Who profits the most?

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