Self-discrimination: A field experiment on obesity

Pablo Brañas-Garza and Antonios Proestakis

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: While it is well-established in the literature that obese people are discriminated against in the working environment, little is known about their own actual behavior. Our experimental setting investigates whether these potentially discriminated people respond in a different way when faced with the opportunity of earning a positive amount of money. Significant lower money requests by people who are self-reported as obese confirm our self-discrimination hypothesis, offering an additional explanation for the wage gap; Thus, it seems that these obese people earn less not only because of discrimination against them but also because they themselves are less demanding. Interestingly, results are more robust for females, especially for those who "feel", but they are not actually, obese.

Keywords: Discrimination; obesity; field experiment; gender; self-perception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chapman.edu/ESI/wp/Branas-Garza_Obesity.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Self discrimination: A field experiment on obesity (2014)
Working Paper: Self discrimination: A field experiment on obesity (2014)
Working Paper: Self-discrimination: A field experiment on obesity (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:chu:wpaper:11-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Megan Luetje ().