Body Weight and Labour Market Outcomes in Post-Soviet Russia

Sonya Huffman () and Marian Rizov

Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper estimates the impacts of weight, measured by body mass index (BMI), on employment, wages, and missed work due to illness for Russian adults by gender, in order to better understand the mechanisms through which obesity affects employment, wages, and sick-leave days using recent panel data (1994-2005) from the nationally representative Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS). We employ econometric techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity and potential biases due to endogeneity in BMI. The results show an inverted U-shaped effect of BMI on probability of employment for men and women. We did not find evidence of wage penalty for higher BMI. In fact, the wages for overweighed men are higher. However, having a BMI above 28.3 increases the number of days missing work days due to health problems for men. Overall, we find negative effects of obesity (BMI above 30) on employment only for women but not on wages. During the transition in Russia, the increasingly competitive pressure in the labour market combined with economic insecurity faced by the population has lead to a muted impact of an individual's weight on labour market outcomes.

Keywords: Russia; BMI; Labour outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 J71 O51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-05-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in International Journal of Manpower 2014, vol. 35 no. 5, pp. 671-687

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/papers/p13665-2011-05-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Body weight and labour market outcomes in Post-Soviet Russia (2014)
Working Paper: Body weight and labour market outcomes in Post-Soviet Russia (2014)
Working Paper: Body Weight and Labour Market Outcomes in Post-Soviet Russia (2014)
Working Paper: Body Weight and Labour Market Outcomes in Post-Soviet Russia (2012)
Working Paper: Body Weight and Labour Market Outcomes in Post-Soviet Russia (2011)
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:isu:genres:33665

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().