Body Size, Skills, and Income: Evidence From 150,000 Teenage Siblings
Petter Lundborg,
Paul Nystedt (paul.nystedt@jibs.hj.se) and
Dan-Olof Rooth
Demography, 2014, vol. 51, issue 5, 1573-1596
Abstract:
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 provide the first evidence of a large adult male labor market penalty for being overweight or obese as a teenager. Second, we replicate this result using data from the United States and the United Kingdom. Third, we note a strikingly strong within-family relationship between body size and cognitive skills/noncognitive skills. Fourth, a large part of the estimated body-size penalty reflects lower skill acquisition among overweight and obese teenagers. Taken together, these results reinforce the importance of policy combating early-life obesity in order to reduce healthcare expenditures as well as poverty and inequalities later in life. Copyright Population Association of America 2014
Keywords: Obesity; Overweight; Discrimination; Earnings; Skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13524-014-0325-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
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:spr:demogr:v:51:y:2014:i:5:p:1573-1596
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-014-0325-6
Access Statistics for this article
Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook
More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).