Abstract
AbstractThis paper examines the consequences of using self-reported measures of BMI when estimating the effect of BMI on income for women using both Irish and US data. We find that self-reported BMI is subject to substantial measurement error and that this error deviates from classical measurement error. These errors cause the traditional least squares estimator to overestimate the relationship between BMI and income. We show that neither the conditional expectation estimator nor the instrumental variables approach adequately address the bias and briefly discuss alternative approaches that could be considered when faced with non-classical measurement error.JEL codesC13, C26, I14
Highlights
Obesity is a medical condition described as excess body weight in the form of fat
Studies examining the individual costs of obesity typically rely on self-reported data to measure Body Mass Index (BMI)
–.209 (.052) 2.24 (.129) –.026 (.024) 0.473 (2.57) 11.69 (.663) −7.16 (2.22) −3.94 (.701) 2191 measurement error which could bias any estimated relationships. This paper uses both Irish and US data to explore the nature of measurement error in self-reported BMI and to examine the consequences of this error when estimating the relationship between BMI and income
Summary
Obesity is a medical condition described as excess body weight in the form of fat. The International Association for the Study of Obesity (IASO) reports that approximately 1.5 billion adults are currently overweight and of these, 525 million are obese (IASCO 2010). There have been a number of studies that examine the impact of obesity on individual outcomes such as wages (Cawley 2004; Brunello and d’Hombres 2007), labour force participation and employment (De Sousa 2012) and educational achievement (Kaestner and Grossman 2009; von Hinke et al 2012). Many of these studies find a significant negative association between body weight and individual success, so that the costs of obesity are borne at the individual as well as the national level. This is especially true for women who are the focus of this paper
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