Matthew C. Harris

THE IMPACT OF BODY WEIGHT ON OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

This article examines the relationship between individuals weight and employment decisions over the life cycle. I estimate a dynamic stochastic model of individuals annual choices of occupation, hours worked, and schooling. Evidence suggests that heavier individuals face higher switching costs when transitioning into white‐collar occupations, earn lower returns to experience in white‐collar occupations, and earn lower wages in socially intensive jobs. I simulate a hypothetical antidiscrimination policy treating obese workers as a protected class. Although such a policy would reduce gaps in occupational attainment, it would have little effect on the observed divergence in wages between obese and nonobese workers.

Reference Health and the Demand for Medical Care

We propose that health in prior periods, termed reference health, is theoretically and empirically relevant to the demand for medical care. To address non‐normality in the distributions of medical care spending, consumption, and health, we use a conditional density estimator nested in a finite mixture framework. We find that reference health can help explain the variation in spending among individuals with the same contemporaneous health, particularly in the top tail of the spending distribution. We demonstrate that omitting reference health understates the potential cost‐savings of healthy aging initiatives by 50%.

Imperfect information on physical activity and caloric intake

&NA; Using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Data, I find that individuals who overestimate their activity level by one standard deviation consume 40–60 extra calories per day, or enough to gain five pounds per year. These extra calories are composed mainly of sugar and carbohydrate, and are concentrated among individuals in the 75th and 90th percentiles of caloric intake. The link between overeating and inaccurate estimation of physical activity is strongest among less educated individuals and individuals with high variance in their physical activity, suggesting that imperfect recall or information gaps explain at least part of the relationship of interest. These results imply the existence of a necessary condition for physical activity‐based information treatments to be effective in changing health behaviors and obesity rates.

Who Are the Big Medical Care Spenders

The top 5 percent of medical care consumers account for 50 percent of medical care expenditures, which is 9 percent of annual U.S. GDP. We offer new theoretical and empirical evidence that not just poor health, but the path to poor health, can better predict big spenders. Modeling the full distribution of expenses using the Health and Retirement Survey, we find that a 10 percent decline in health increases the probability of participation in the top 5 percent by 22 percent. Focusing on health dynamics gives policy makers new avenues to address high medical care costs.

The effects of prospective mate quality on investments in healthy body weight among single women

This paper examines how a single females investment in healthy body weight is affected by the quality of single males in her marriage market. A principle concern in estimation is the presence of market-level unobserved heterogeneity that may be correlated with changes in single male quality. To address this concern, we employ a differencing strategy that normalizes the exercise behaviors of single women to those of their married counterparts. Our main results suggest that when potential mate quality in a marriage market decreases, single black women invest less in healthy body weight. For example, we find that a ten percentage point increase in the proportion of low quality single black males leads to a 5% to 10% decrease in vigorous exercise taken by single black females. No significant response is found for single white women. These results highlight the relationship between male and female human capital acquisition that is driven by participation in the marriage market. Our results suggest that programs designed to improve the economic prospects of single males may yield positive externalities in the form of improved health behaviors, such as more exercise, particularly for single black females.