Objective. To measure the effect of body weight on employment disability.
Data Sources. Female respondents to the National Longitudinal Survey of You
th (NLSY), a nationally representative sample of American youth, surveyed f
rom 1979 to 1998, merged with data from the child sample of the NLSY.
Study Design. A series of probit models and probit models with instrumental
variables is estimated with the goal of measuring the effect of body weigh
t on employment disability. The two outcomes of interest are whether a woma
n reports that her health limits the amount of work that she can do for pay
, and whether she reports that her health limits the kind of work that she
can do for pay. The models control for factors that affect the probability
of health limitations on employment, such as education, cognitive ability,
income of other family members, and characteristics of children in the hous
ehold. Self-reports of height and weight are corrected for reporting error.
Principal Findings. All else being equal, heavier women are more likely to
report employment disability. However, this overall correlation may be due
to any or all of the following factors: weight causing disability, disabili
ty causing weight gain, or unobserved factors causing both. Instrumental va
riables estimates provide no evidence that body weight affects the probabil
ity of either type of employment disability.
Conclusions. This study finds no evidence that body weight causes employmen
t disability. Instead, the observed correlation between heaviness and disab
ility may be due to disability causing weight gain or unobservable factors
causing both disability and weight gain.