Marriage markets as explanation for why heavier people work more hours

Shoshana Grossbard and Sankar Mukhopadhyay

IZA Journal of Labor Economics, 2017, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-30

Abstract: Abstract Is BMI related to hours of work through marriage market mechanisms? We empirically explore this issue using data from the NLSY79 and NLSY97 and a number of estimation strategies (including OLS, IV, and sibling FE). Our IV estimates (with same-sex sibling’s BMI as an instrument and a large set of controls including wage) suggest that a one-unit increase in BMI leads to an almost 2% increase in White married women’s hours of work. However, BMI is not associated with hours of work of married men. We also find that a one-unit increase in BMI leads to a 1.4% increase in White single women’s hours of work, suggesting that single women may expect future in-marriage transfers that vary by body weight. We show that the positive association between BMI and hours of work of White single women increases with self-assessed probability of future marriage and varies with expected cumulative spousal income. Comparisons between the association between BMI and hours of work for White and Black married women suggest a possible racial gap in intra-marriage transfers from husbands to wives.

Keywords: Obesity; Labor supply; Marriage; Marriage market; Gender; Race; Intra-household bargaining; Personal finances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s40172-017-0059-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:izalbr:v:6:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1186_s40172-017-0059-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40172

DOI: 10.1186/s40172-017-0059-y

Access Statistics for this article

IZA Journal of Labor Economics is currently edited by Joni Hersch and Pierre Cahuc

More articles in IZA Journal of Labor Economics from Springer, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().