Does Obesity Hurt Your Wages More in Dublin than in Madrid? Evidence from ECHP

Béatrice d'Hombres and Giorgio Brunello

No 1704, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We use data from the European Community Household Panel to investigate the impact of obesity on wages in 9 European countries, ranging from Ireland to Spain. We find that the common impact of obesity on wages is negative and statistically significant, independently of gender. Given the nature of European labor markets, however, we believe that a common impact is overly restrictive. When we allow this impact to vary across countries, we find a negative relationship between the BMI and wages in the countries of the European "olive belt" and a positive relationship in the countries of the "beer belt". We speculate that such difference could be driven by the interaction between the weather, BMI and individual (unobserved) productivity.

Keywords: Europe; body mass index; wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2005-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-hea and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published as 'Does body weight affect wages? Evidence from Europe' in: Economics and Human Biology, 2007, 5 (1), 1-19

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