Body Weight and Labour Market Outcomes inPost-Soviet Russia

This paper estimates the impacts of weight, measured by body mass index (BMI), onemployment, wages, and missed work due to illness for Russian adults by gender, in orderto better understand the mechanisms through which obesity affects employment, wages,and sick-leave days using recent panel data (1994-2005) from the nationally representativeRussian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS). We employ econometric techniques tocontrol for unobserved heterogeneity and potential biases due to endogeneity in BMI. Theresults show an inverted U-shaped effect of BMI on probability of employment for menand women. We did not find evidence of wage penalty for higher BMI. In fact, the wagesfor overweighed men are higher. However, having a BMI above 28.3 increases the numberof days missing work days due to health problems for men. Overall, we find negativeeffects 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 marketcombined with economic insecurity faced by the population has lead to a muted impact ofan individual’s weight on labour market outcomes.[...]