A Matter of Weight? The Role of Spouses. Physical Attractiveness on Hours of Work

Sonia Oreffice and Climent Quintana-Domeque

No 7, CHILD Working Papers Series from Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD) - CCA

Abstract: We explore the role of relative physical attractiveness in the household on the hours worked by married men and women. Using PSID data, we find that husbands who are thinner relative to their wives work fewer hours, while wives who are heavier relative to their husbands work more hours. High relative body weight leads to low Pareto weight in the household, inducing spouses to compensate with more hours of work. These re- sults are robust to controlling for individual and spousal characteristics. Our household bargaining interpretation is supported by the fact that we cannot statistically reject the collective proportionality restriction when including measures of the distribution of relative physical attractiveness in the population.

Keywords: hours worked; body mass index; collective model. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 J1 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2012
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