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Waist circumference, body mass index, and employment outcomes

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Abstract

Body mass index (BMI) is an imperfect measure of body fat. Recent studies provide evidence in favor of replacing BMI with waist circumference (WC). Hence, I investigated whether or not the association between fat mass and employment status vary by anthropometric measures. I used 15 rounds of the Health Survey for England (1998–2013), which has measures of employment status in addition to measured height, weight, and WC. WC and BMI were entered as continuous variables and obesity as binary variables defined using both WC and BMI. I used multivariate models controlling for a set of covariates. The association of WC with employment was of greater magnitude than the association between BMI and employment. I reran the analysis using conventional instrumental variables methods. The IV models showed significant impacts of obesity on employment; however, they were not more pronounced when WC was used to measure obesity, compared to BMI. This means that, in the IV models, the impact of fat mass on employment did not depend on the measure of fat mass.

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Notes

  1. Obesity is a concept that refers to excessive fatness [14].

  2. This means that WC was measured at a date close to the height and weight measurement. However, it is not measured at exactly the same date.

  3. These models are estimated using linear two-stage least squares regressions.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the project “The burden of obesity in Norway: morbidity, mortality, health service use and productivity loss” funded by the Norwegian Research Council through Grant 250335/F20. I also thank Laura Vallejo-Torres, Apostolos Davillas, and Per Arne Holman for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health and Inequality, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Pb 4404 Nydalen, 0403, Oslo, Norway

    Jonas Minet Kinge

  2. Department of Health Management and Health Economics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Jonas Minet Kinge

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Correspondence to Jonas Minet Kinge.

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An earlier version of the paper has been published as a working paper here: http://www.med.uio.no/helsam/forskning/nettverk/hero/publikasjoner/skriftserie/2016/4.html.

Appendix

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Table 5 First-stage results of the impact of the instrument on the endogenous variable
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Kinge, J.M. Waist circumference, body mass index, and employment outcomes. Eur J Health Econ 18, 787–799 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-016-0833-y

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