Abstract
The declining labour force participation among men between the ages 25 and 54 in the United State has attracted the attention of policymakers and the public. I document this trend by obesity status during the period 1990–2016 using the Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey. I find that the likelihood of being out of the labour force has been increasing by approximately 0.22 percentage points every year on average for non-obese men, while that of obese men has been increasing by approximately 0.28 percentage points. This indicates that the difference in the propensity to be out of the labour force has widened by 1.6 percentage points between the obese and the non-obese during 1990–2016. It seems that the labour force participation gap between obese men and non-obese men started to increase during the housing bubble period, 2001–2007. The difference in the trends seems to be driven by non-Hispanic whites, men without a college degree, and men aged 25–44.
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Source: Bureau of Labour Statistics-Labour Force Participation Rate, men aged 25–54, and Author’s calculations from the BRFSS 1990–2016
Source: Author’s calculations from the BRFSS 1990–2016
Notes
The upward trend in the mortality of whites was also documented by Case and Deaton (2015).
The Bureau of Labour Statistics: Local Area Unemployment Statistics. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/dsrv?la.
There are 695 men with a BMI < 15 and 21,209 men with BMI > 50. Since there are 1,379,524 men in the sample, they represent approximately 1.59% of the sample.
In the BRFSS, the LFP declined by approximately 2.2 percentage points from 1995 to 1996, as Figs. 1 and 2 show. Though it is possible that the sample in the 1996 BRFSS was not as random as those in other years, the author thinks that this is likely due to the small sample size. Because the sample is restricted to prime-age men, the sample size for 1995 is 28,452 while that for 1996 is 30,225. Even if this might have been because the people who responded in 1996 differed in economic and social traits, the results are unlikely to be substantially affected unless the sampling error was significantly correlated with obesity.
Unfortunately, county of residence is not available in the BRFSS 2013–2016, and this makes it impossible to include county fixed effects.
I thank a referee for suggesting this specification.
Though morbidly obese are defined as those whose BMI is greater than 40, it is known that self-report on average understates weight and overstates height, and some researchers use a lower cut point for the morbidly obese to adjust for self-report biases (e.g. Sturm and Hattori 2013).
I thank a referee for this suggestion.
For this specification, the sample size is slightly reduced as the question does not seem to have been asked in the 1990 BRFSS.
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I thank three anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions.
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Kuroki, M. The missing obese men? Labour force participation and obesity among prime-age men in the United States. J Pop Research 36, 65–80 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-019-09220-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-019-09220-1