Frank Heiland

From “Overweight” to “About Right”: Evidence of a Generational Shift in Body Weight Norms

In this article, we describe differences in the self‐perception of weight status in the United States between the two most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) periods (1988–1994 and 1999–2004), and test the hypothesis that secular increases in adult mean BMI, adult obesity, and childhood obesity contributed to changes over time in weight perceptions. We find that the probability of self‐classifying as overweight is significantly lower on average in the more recent survey, for both women and men, controlling for objective weight status and other factors. Among women, the decline in the tendency to self‐classify as overweight is concentrated in the 17–35 age range, and is more pronounced among women with normal BMI than those with overweight BMI. Among men, the shift away from feeling overweight is roughly equal across age groups. Overweight men exhibit a sharper decline in feeling overweight than normal weight men. Despite the declines in feeling overweight between surveys, weight misperception did not increase significantly for men and decreased by a sizable margin among women. We interpret the findings as evidence of a generational shift in social norms related to body weight. As a result, people may be less likely to desire weight loss than previously, limiting the effectiveness of public health campaigns aimed at weight reduction. On the other hand, there may be health benefits associated with improved body image.

Social Dynamics of Obesity

In order to explain the substantial recent increases in obesity rates in the United States, we consider the effect of falling food prices in the context of a model involving endogenous body weight norms and an explicit, empirically grounded description of human metabolism. Unlike previous representative agent models of price-induced gains in average weight, our model, by including metabolic heterogeneity, is able to capture changes in additional features of the distribution, such as the dramatic growth in upper-quartile weights that are not readily inferred from the representative agent setting. We calibrate an analytical choice model to American women in the 30-to-60-year-old age bracket and compare the model’s equilibrium weight distributions to data from NHANES surveys spanning (intermittently) the period from 1976 through 2000. The model predicts increases in average weight and obesity rates with considerable accuracy and captures a considerable portion of the relative growth in upperquantile weights. The differential response to price declines across the distribution depends on the fact that human basal metabolism (or resting calorie expenditure) is increasing and yet concave in body weight, and therefore food price effects on weight tend to be larger for individuals who are heavier initially. The lagged adjustment of weight norms helps to explain recent observations that obesity rates have continued to rise since the mid 1990s, despite an apparent leveling off of price declines. The predicted increase in body weight aspirations agrees with an observed trend in self-reported desired weights, and it defies the conventional wisdom that thinness has been a growing obsession among American women in recent decades.

Weight-related behavior among adolescents: the role of peer effects.

Purpose To investigate whether social interactions in friendship networks influence the following weight-related behaviors of adolescents: exercising regularly, playing an active sport, hours of TV/Video viewing, sleeping six or fewer hours, eating breakfast on weekdays, frequency of eating at fast food restaurants, eating five servings of fruits/vegetables daily, and consuming calorie-dense snacks. Method Data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents are used to examine the association between peer and individual weight-related behaviors. Evidence from multivariate regression analysis controlling for an extensive list of individual- and family-level factors as well as school-level unobserved heterogeneity is obtained. Results We find a significant positive association between individuals and friends behaviors in terms of sports, exercise and fast food consumption. The estimated associations are robust to controls for individual- and family-level factors, unobserved heterogeneity at the school level and our attempts to account for non-random peer selection. Conclusions The social transmission of weight-related behaviors is a viable explanation for the spread of obesity in friendship networks documented in recent research. Traditional weight reduction interventions may be fruitfully complemented with strategies that focus on harnessing peer support to modify behaviors.

Early Claiming of Social Security Benefits and Labor Supply Behavior of Older Americans

The labour supply incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the United States Social Security Old Age benefits program are of growing importance as the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) increases to 67 and the labour force participation of older Americans starts to increase. These incentives allow individuals who claim benefits before the NRA but continue to work, or return to the labour force, to increase their future rate of benefit pay by having benefits withheld. Since the adjustment of the benefit rate takes place only after the NRA is reached, benefits received before the NRA can become actuarially unfair for those who continue to work after claiming. Consistent with these incentives, estimates from bivariate models of the monthly labour force exit and claiming hazards using data from the Health and Retirement Study indicate that early claimers who do not withdraw from the labour force around the time they claim are increasingly likely to stay in the labour force.

How Well Do Individuals Predict the Selling Prices of Their Homes

Self-reported home values are widely used as a measure of housing wealth by researchers employing a variety of data sets and studying a number of different individual and household level decisions. The accuracy of this measure is an open empirical question, and requires some type of market assessment of the values reported. In this research, we study the predictive power of self-reported housing wealth when estimating sales prices utilizing the Health and Retirement Study. We find that homeowners, on average, overestimate the value of their properties by between 5% and 10%. More importantly, we are the first to document a strong correlation between accuracy and the economic conditions at the time of the purchase of the property (measured by the prevalent interest rate, the growth of household income, and the growth of median housing prices). While most individuals overestimate the value of their properties, those who bought during more difficult economic times tend to be more accurate, and in some cases even underestimate the value of their house. These results establish a surprisingly strong, likely permanent, and in many cases long-lived, effect of the initial conditions surrounding the purchases of properties, on how individuals value them. This cyclicality of the overestimation of house prices can provide some explanations for the difficulties currently faced by many homeowners, who were expecting large appreciations in home value to rescue them in case of increases in interest rates which could jeopardize their ability to live up to their financial commitments.

Racial differences in the influence of female adolescents’ body size on dating and sex

This paper investigates the effect of body size on dating and sexual experiences of white (non-Hispanic) and African American (non-Hispanic) female adolescents. Using data from Add-Health, we estimate the effects of obesity and BMI z-score on the probability of having been involved in a romantic relationship, having ever been touched in the genital area in a sexual way, and having ever engaged in sexual intercourse. We find that obese white teenage girls are less likely to have been in a romantic relationship compared to their non-obese counterparts. In addition, obese white girls are less likely to ever have had sex (intercourse) or to ever have been intimate. There are no systematic differences in relationship experiences and sexual behaviors between obese and non-obese black girls. Overall, the estimated relationships are very robust to common environmental influences at the school-level and to the inclusion of proxies for low self-esteem, attitudes toward sex and interviewer assessment of appearance and personality. Instrumental variables estimates and estimates from models with lagged weight status confirm the overall patterns.

Should We Get Married? The Effect of Parents’ Marriage on Out-of-Wedlock Children

Using a representative sample of children all born to unwed parents drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and a potential outcome approach to account for self-selection into marriage, we investigate whether marriage after childbearing has a causal effect on early child development. Comparing children with similar background characteristics and parental mate-selection patterns who differ only in terms of whether their parents marry after childbirth, we find that marriage after childbirth significantly increases a childs early cognitive performance but there is no evidence that it affects child asthma risk or behavioral outcomes.

Big and Beautiful? Evidence of Racial Differences in the Perceived Attractiveness of Obese Females

This paper investigates the relationships between body weight, race, and attractiveness in appearance and personality among adolescents. We study a sample of 5947 (non-Hispanic) white and black girls age 12 to 18 who were interviewed by a group of 338 interviewers. We find that overweight and obese white female adolescents are, respectively, 23% and 40% less likely, on average, to be perceived as physically attractive compared to normal-weight white girls. The physical appearance penalties are significantly smaller for overweight and obese black girls compared to white girls. These findings suggest that being overweight or obese is costly due to its negative impact on inner and outer perceived beauty, providing an explanation for the observed stigmatization of overweight and obesity among women in labor and relationship markets. The smaller beauty penalties for black girls above the normal-weight range suggest that the range of body sizes considered attractive may be wider for black females.

Does the birth order affect the cognitive development of a child

This article investigates the link between position in the birth order and early scholastic ability. Using matched mother–child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 cohort, NLSY79), I find that being the first-born is beneficial even after controlling for (nonlinear) effects of family size and child characteristics. The verbal ability of first-borns is about one-tenth of a SD higher than for children in the middle of the birth order. There is no evidence that last-borns fare better than intermediate children. The first-born advantage is confirmed by estimates from within-family variation models and I argue that the findings are consistent with the resource dilution hypothesis.

Adolescent weight gain and social networks: is there a contagion effect?

Previous studies on the spread of obesity in social networks have focused on the contemporaneous effect of peer weight outcomes on individuals. This article is the first to investigate the longer term effects, within adolescence and from adolescence into early adulthood, of peers on individual weight outcomes. Using data from the first three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), and accounting for correlated effects using a number of empirical strategies including school-level fixed effects and accounting for neighbourhood preferences, we show that Body Mass Index (BMI) and overweight status in a persons friendship network influence their BMI and likelihood of being overweight. The evidence suggests that there is some persistence of the effects of past peer weight experiences on individual weight outcomes during adolescence and into early adulthood. The findings are consistent with adolescence being an important formative period of individuals’ preference for ideal physique and own body weight aspirations. We conclude that policy makers should be particularly concerned with interventions during childhood and adolescence, in order to slow the spread of obesity by promoting a healthy body image and positive health behaviours.