The Impact of Income on the Weight of Elderly Americans

John Cawley, John R. Moran and Kosali Simon

No 14104, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper tests whether income affects the body weight and clinical weight classification of elderly Americans using a natural experiment that led otherwise identical retirees to receive significantly different Social Security payments based on their year of birth. We exploit this natural experiment by estimating models of instrumental variables using data from the National Health Interview Surveys. The model estimates rule out even moderate effects of income on weight and on the probability of being underweight or obese, especially for men.

JEL-codes: H55 I1 I12 I38 J14 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
Note: AG EH LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published as Cawley, John, John Moran, and Kosali Simon. “The Impact of Income on the Weight of Elderly Americans.” Health Economics, 2010, 19(8): 979-993.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14104.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of income on the weight of elderly Americans (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14104

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14104

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().