Duke 2008 | ASHE | Equity and Efficiency in Health and Healthcare

The interaction of labor market activity and obesity is multidirectional; research has documented that obese individuals face discrimination in the labor market and earn lower wages, while other research suggests that more sedentary occupations have contributed to the rise in obesity. The papers in this session contribute to our knowledge in this area, documenting labor market consequences of obesity, and examining how labor market activity may have consequences for body weight.

Euna Han will present research (collaborative with Edward Norton and Lisa Powell) on the association of body weight with the occupation choice among white collar, services, sales, managerial jobs, and jobs requiring social interactions with colleagues or customers. Fixed effects models are estimated to address time- invariant unobserved heterogeneity. The occupation choice is found to be one mechanism through which obesity and wages are related, especially for women. This is the first study to assess the association between BMI and the occupational sorting using panel data.

John Cawley will present a paper (joint with Feng Liu) that examines time-use data to find mechanisms for the association between maternal employment and childhood obesity. Models of instrumental variables (in which maternal employment is instrumented using state unemployment rate) are used to generate causal estimates of the impact of maternal employment on time spent in activities associated with diet or physical activity: e.g. shopping for groceries, cooking, and eating with children. Maternal employment is found to result in significant decreases in time spent in activities that are protective against childhood obesity, only a small fraction these reductions are offset by increases in time by husbands or partners.

Roy Wada will present research (joint with Erdal Tekin) that is an innovation over past studies of the relationship between obesity and wages. The past studies generally used body mass index (BMI) as a measure of fatness, but BMI can be high because a person is muscular and there is unlikely to be a wage penalty for muscularity. Wada presents results of models in which body fat rather than BMI is used as a measure of fatness. Model estimates show that higher body fat is associated with lower wages while fat-free mass (such as muscle) is associated with higher wages.

The session also features discussants who are experienced researchers in this field: Michael Grossman of CUNY, Timothy Classen of Loyola University of Chicago, and Lan Liang of AHRQ.