Fat Debtors: Time Discounting, Its Anomalies, and Body Mass Index

Shinsuke Ikeda, Kang Myong-Il and Fumio Ohtake

ISER Discussion Paper from Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University

Abstract: In view of the finding that debtors are likely to be more obese than nondebtors, we investigate whether interpersonal differences in body mass are, as in the case of debt behavior, related to those in time discounting and time discounting anomalies. The effects of time discounting on body massindex (BMI) and the probabilities of being obese, severely obese, and underweight are detected by incorporating three properties of intertemporal preferences: (i) impatience, measured by the level of the respondents' discountrate; (ii) hyperbolic discounting, where discount rates for the discounting of immediate future payoffs are higher than those of distant future payoffs; and (iii) the sign effect, wherein future negative payoffs are discounted at a lower rate than are future positive payoffs. We also find that body mass is non-monotonically correlated with age, income, and working hours. As a policy implication, body mass can potentially be controlled by changing the intertemporal structure of medical care costs.

Date: 2009-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iser.osaka-u.ac.jp/library/dp/2009/DP0732.pdf

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:dpr:wpaper:0732

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISER Discussion Paper from Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Librarian ().