Date and Time
July 17, 2007
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Noemi Pace - Stanford University

Co-authors: Vincenzo Atella and Daniela Vuri

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 heterogeneous 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.