Are Employers Discriminating with Respect to Weight? European Evidence using Quantile Regression

Atella, Vincenzo; Pace, Noemi; Vuri, Daniela

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1120345

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Are Employers Discriminating with Respect to Weight? European Evidence using Quantile Regression

CEIS Working Paper No. 123

54 Pages Posted: 17 Apr 2008 Last revised: 25 Feb 2014

See all articles by Vincenzo Atella

Vincenzo Atella

University of Rome Tor Vergata - Centre for International Studies on Economic Growth (CEIS); Department of Economics and Finance; University of Rome Tor Vergata - Faculty of Economics

Noemi Pace

University of Rome "Tor Vergata"; Stanford University - CHP-PCOR

Daniela Vuri

University of Rome Tor Vergata; IZA Institute of Labor Economics; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)

Date Written: April 2008

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between obesity and wages, using data for nine countries from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) over the period 1998-2001. We improve upon the existing literature by adopting an Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression (IVQR) model to characterize the heterogenous impact of obesity at different points of the wage distribution. Our results show that i) the evidence obtained from mean regression and pooled analysis hides a significant amount of heterogeneity as the relationship between obesity and wages differs across countries and wages quantiles and ii) cultural, environmental or institutional settings do not seem to be able to explain differences among countries.

Keywords: quantile treatment effect, obesity, wages, endogeneity

JEL Classification: C12, C21, C23, I10, I18

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Atella, Vincenzo and Pace, Noemi and Pace, Noemi and Vuri, Daniela, Are Employers Discriminating with Respect to Weight? European Evidence using Quantile Regression (April 2008). CEIS Working Paper No. 123, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1120345 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1120345