title: Body size, skills, and income: evidence from 150,000 teenage siblings.
abstract: We provide new evidence on the long-run labor market penalty of teenage overweight and obesity using unique and large-scale data on 150,000 male siblings from the Swedish military enlistment. Our empirical analysis provides four important results. First, we provide the first evidence of a large adult male labor market penalty for being overweight or obese as a teenager. Second, we replicate this result using data from the United States and the United Kingdom. Third, we note a strikingly strong within-family relationship between body size and cognitive skills/noncognitive skills. Fourth, a large part of the estimated body-size penalty reflects lower skill acquisition among overweight and obese teenagers. Taken together, these results reinforce the importance of policy combating early-life obesity in order to reduce healthcare expenditures as well as poverty and inequalities later in life.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Economic Demography, and HEP, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Petter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lundborg
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Nystedt
authors.forename: Dan-Olof
authors.initials: DO
authors.lastname: Rooth
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D015992:Body Mass Index; D001837:Body Weights and Measures; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008297:Male; D009765:Obesity / Q000191:economics / Q000523:psychology; D050177:Overweight / Q000191:economics* / Q000523:psychology*; D035781:Siblings; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013548:Sweden; D006113:United Kingdom; D014481:United States