QUANTILE REGRESSION ANALYSIS OF BODY MASS
AND WAGES
SUMMARY
Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we explore the relationship between body mass and wages.
We use quantile regression to provide a broad description of the relationship across the wage distribution. We also
allow the relationship to vary by the degree of social skills involved in different jobs. Our results find that for female
workers body mass and wages are negatively correlated at all points in their wage distribution. The strength of the
relationship is larger at higher-wage levels. For male workers, the relationship is relatively constant across wage
distribution but heterogeneous across ethnic groups. When controlling for the endogeneity of body mass, we find
that additional body mass has a negative causal impact on the wages of white females earning more than the median
wages and of white males around the median wages. Among these workers, the wage penalties are larger for those
employed in jobs that require extensive social skills. These findings may suggest that labor markets reward white
workers for good physical shape differently, depending on the level of wages and the type of job a worker has.
Copyright r 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Received 30 April 2009; Revised 9 March 2010; Accepted 10 March 2011
KEY WORDS: wages; body mass index; quantile regression; endogeneity