Does body weight affect wages? Evidence from Europe.

We use data from the European Community Household Panel to investigate the impact of body weight on wages in nine European countries. When we pool the available data across countries and years, we find that a 10% increase in the average body mass index reduces the real earnings of males and females by 3.27% and 1.86%, respectively. Since European culture, society and labour market are heterogeneous, we estimate separate regressions for Northern and Southern Europe and find that the negative impact of the body mass index on earnings is larger--and statistically significant--in the latter area.