The effects of bodyweight on wages in urban Mexico

Pierre Levasseur ()

Cahiers du GREThA (2007-2019) from Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée (GREThA)

Abstract: The effects of bodyweight on wages seem to be closely linked to the level of development of the country concerned. In rich countries, overweight and obese workers seem usually penalized, whereas in the poorest societies the fattest tend to earn more. However, in several emerging economies such as Mexico, the nature of the effect is complex and remains still unknown. Given a complex nutritional situation where hunger and obesity coexist, the literature suggests a quadratic relationship in these countries. The main objective of this study is to explore the impact of bodyweight on wages in urban Mexico using panel data from the Mexican Family Life Survey. Two main methodological treatments are highlighted. First, we implement a two-stage model, based on an expanded Mincer earning function, to control for potential sample selection bias and endogeneity problems. Second, we use complementary parametric and semi-parametric estimators in order to analyze accurately the nature of the relationship. Our results show that the effects of bodyweight on wages in Mexico depend on the kind of contract and gender. For employees with formal contracts, BMI tends to have a negative and linear impact on wages, especially for women. By contrast, we find a positive but non-significant causal relationship between bodyweight and wages for employees with informal contracts. Note that this surprising result could concern women particularly. However, the difficulty in well identifying the earning function of such informal employments is likely to overstate this positive effect.

Keywords: Mexico; emerging countries; wage; kind of contract; bodyweight; obesity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I13 J31 J71 O12 O15 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://cahiersdugretha.u-bordeaux.fr/2016/2016-18.pdf (application/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:grt:wpegrt:2016-18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers du GREThA (2007-2019) from Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée (GREThA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ernest Miguelez ().