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Title: Body Composition and Wages
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Wada, Roy
Tekin, Erdal
Body Composition and Wages
Economics and Human Biology 8,2 (July 2010): 242-254.
Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X10000213
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Elsevier
Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Methods/Methodology; National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES); Obesity; Wage Determination

We develop measures of body composition - body fat (BF) and fat-free mass (FFM) - using data on bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) that are available in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III and estimate wage models for respondents in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Previous research use body size or BMI as measures of obesity despite a growing concern that they do not distinguish between body fat and fat-free body mass or adequately control for non-homogeneity inside human body. Therefore, measures presented in this paper represent a useful alternative to BMI-based proxies of obesity. This paper also contributes to the growing literature on the role of non-cognitive factors on wage determination. Our results indicate that BF is associated with decreased wages for both males and females among whites and blacks. We also present evidence suggesting that FFM is associated with increased wages. We show that these results are not the artifacts of unobserved heterogeneity. Finally, our findings are robust to numerous specification checks and to a large number of alternative BIA prediction equations from which the body composition measures are derived. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Bibliography Citation
Wada, Roy and Erdal Tekin. "Body Composition and Wages." Economics and Human Biology 8,2 (July 2010): 242-254.