"CUMULATIVE EFFECTS ON WEIGHT DUE TO AN INITIAL OCCUPATIONAL CHOICE AS A BLUE COLLAR WORKER"

The objective is to estimate the effect on one’s weight decades later of choosing a blue collar job as his/her initial job. OLS and probit models are estimated, using dummy variables for overweight and obesity as the dependent variables. Various two stage models treat occupational choice to be endogenous. Using strong instrumental variables to identify occupational choice, yields statistically significant results indicating that the initial choice of a blue collar job is associated with an increase of 6.6% (4.8%) in the probability of being overweight (obese). We also find that an additional year of blue collar work is associated with an increase of 1.1% and 1.4% in the probability of being overweight and obese, respectively.