Obesity history and male employment

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, this article computes the stock of obesity as the number of obese years in the adult life of an individual. Then it estimates the effect of the stock of obesity on the probability of being employed. It is found that the accumulated years of morbid obesity (i.e. obesity associated with a body mass index above 40) has a large negative impact on employment status. This effect remains significant even after conditioning on time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. The results of the IV probit analysis indicate that the stock of morbid obese years can be regarded as exogenous. Less severe levels of obesity do not seem to have an impact on employment.