Body Weight and Labour Market Outcomes in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

This paper estimates the impacts of weight, measured by body mass index (BMI), on employment, wages, and missed work due to illness for Russian adults by gender, in order to better understand the mechanisms through which obesity affects employment, wages, and sick-leave days using recent panel data (1994-2005) from the nationally representative Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS). We employ econometric techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity and potential biases due to endogeneity in BMI. The results show an inverted U-shaped effect of BMI on probability of employment for men and women. We did not find evidence of wage penalty for higher BMI. In fact, the wages for overweighed men are higher. However, having a BMI above 28.3 increases the number of days missing work days due to health problems for men. Overall, we find negative effects of obesity (BMI above 30) on employment only for women but not on wages. During the transition in Russia, the increasingly competitive pressure in the labour market combined with economic insecurity faced by the population has lead to a muted impact of an individual’s weight on labour market outcomes.Russia; BMI; Labour outcomes