Wages, BMI, and Age

Christian Gregory

No 10-2, UNCG Economics Working Papers from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics

Abstract: Previous research generally finds that obesity negatively affects wages for women and does not affect wages for men. But this literature has for the most part focused on young workers and has not examined whether the effect of obesity might change as people age. In this essay, I examine the effect of obesity -- and body mass more generally -- on wages across the age distribution, using conventional parametric and flexible semiparametric fixed effect models. The model results suggest two contributions to previous literature. First, the parametric results indicate that, in failing to stratify by age, the literature may overstate the effect of BMI and obesity on wages for women and almost certainly understates any negative association for men. Secondly, the semiparametric models indicate that the wage function isn't really changing as either men or women age: the differences that we observe in the linear specifications are almost all due to the change in the distribution of BMI, rather than a change in the effect of BMI itself on wages.

Keywords: Wages; BMI; Semiparametric; Appearance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 I00 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2010-08-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://bryan.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/10-02.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:ris:uncgec:2010_002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UNCG Economics Working Papers from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics UNC Greensboro, Department of Economics, PO Box 26170, Bryan Building 462, Greensboro, NC 27402. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Albert Link ().