Obesity and the labor market: A fresh look at the weight penalty

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. This paper applies semiparametric regression models to shed light on the relationship between body weight and labor market outcomes in Germany. We find conclusive evidence that these relationships are poorly described by linear or quadratic OLS specifications, which have been the main approaches in previous studies. Women's wages and employment probabilities do not follow a linear relationship and are highest at a body weight far below the clinical threshold of obesity. This indicates that looks, rather than health, is the driving force behind the adverse labor market outcomes to which overweight women are subject. Further support is lent to this notion by the fact that wage penalties for overweight and obese women are only observable in white-collar occupations. On the other hand, bigger appears to be better in the case of men, for whom employment prospects increase with weight, albeit with diminishing returns. However, underweight men in blue-collar jobs earn lower wages because they lack the muscular strength required in such occupations. JEL Classification:J31, J71, C14

Beauty, body size and wages: Evidence from a unique data set

“…Our findings regarding female BMI match those in Garcia and Quintana-Domeque (2007), who do not find a clear penalty for heavier women in European countries. The quadratic relationship between log wages and BMI for men is consistent with the analysis using German data from the GSOEP by Caliendo and Gehrsitz (2014).…”

“…We show that attractiveness and height matter in the labor market in terms of higher wages for both men and women. Moreover, male BMI is non-monotonically related to wages, consistent with Caliendo and Gehrsitz (2014). The height "premium" may reflect the fact that adult stature is positively correlated with cognitive ability (Case and Paxson, 2008), while the non-monotonic relationship of BMI with wages for men is consistent with BMI not being able to distinguish fat from muscle (Burkhauser and Cawley, 2008;Tekin and Wada, 2010).…”

“…The few studies on the marriage market that consider anthropometric measures as mate attributes, directly use BMI (or obesity) as a proxy for physical attractiveness (Averett and Korenman, 1996;Chiappori, Oreffice and Quintana-Domeque, 2012;Oreffice and Quintana-Domeque, 2010). The same approach is undertaken by the empirical analyses of how wages and employment status are related to BMI and obesity (Brunello and d'Hombres, 2007;Caliendo and Gehrsitz, 2014;Cawley, 2004;Cawley, Grabka and Lillard, 2005;Garcia and Quintana-Domeque, 2007).…”

An economy of scales: A selective review of obesity's economic causes, consequences, and solutions

“…Caliendo and Gehrsitz, 2014;Averett, 2011;Brunello and D'Hombres, 2007). In such countries employers do not provide health insurance and thus they have no incentive or even ability to internalize the external medical care costs of obesity.…”

Marriage markets as explanation for why heavier people work more hours

“…Our robustness tests include tests for nonlinearity of the relationship between hours of work and BMI. A number of papers (e.g., Kline and Tobias 2008;Gregory and Ruhm 2011;Caliendo and Gehrsitz 2016) have found evidence of non-linearity in the relationship between wage and BMI. Therefore, at the end of Section 4, we test whether our results are robust to a semiparametric specification where BMI enters the wage equation non-parametrically.…”