On the relationship between BMI and marital dissolution

Héctor Bellido and Miriam Marcén

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The evolution of marital dissolutions has prompted researchers and policymakers to study their causes and consequences. While the effects of changes in the relationship status on the Body Mass Index (BMI) have been thoroughly documented (Selection, Protection, Social Obligation, and Marriage Market hypotheses), much less work has been done to analyze the impact of changes in the BMI on the probability of marital dissolution. We take advantage of the richness of the data on (pre) marital and biological history from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 (NLSY79) to estimate the effect of BMI on marital stability, following an Instrumental Variable approach. We find a small, but statistically-significant, negative effect of this indicator of health on the likelihood of marital dissolution. Supplemental analysis reveals that this effect depends on the category to which people belong according to their BMI (underweight, normal weight, and overweight-obese), and on their race.

Keywords: Body Mass Index; Health; Divorce; Family economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09-20
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)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/73868/1/MPRA_paper_73868.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:73868

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().