Working Paper: NBER ID: w15485
Authors: David O. Meltzer; Zhuo Chen
Abstract: Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially "fast food", has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over 1968-2007 and because minimum wage labor is a major contributor to the cost of food away from home we hypothesized that changes in the minimum wage would be associated with changes in bodyweight over this period. To examine this, we use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1984-2006 to test whether variation in the real minimum wage was associated with changes in body mass index (BMI). We also examine whether this association varied by gender, education and income, and used quantile regression to test whether the association varied over the BMI distribution. We also estimate the fraction of the increase in BMI since 1970 attributable to minimum wage declines. We find that a $1 decrease in the real minimum wage was associated with a 0.06 increase in BMI. This relationship was significant across gender and income groups and largest among the highest percentiles of the BMI distribution. Real minimum wage decreases can explain 10% of the change in BMI since 1970. We conclude that the declining real minimum wage rates has contributed to the increasing rate of overweight and obesity in the United States. Studies to clarify the mechanism by which minimum wages may affect obesity might help determine appropriate policy responses.
Keywords: minimum wage; body weight; obesity; public health
JEL Codes: I1; I28; J3
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| decrease in real minimum wage (J38) | increase in fast food consumption (D18) |
| increase in fast food consumption (D18) | increase in BMI (I14) |
| decrease in real minimum wage (J38) | increase in obesity rates (I14) |
| decrease in real minimum wage (J38) | increase in BMI among higher income and education levels (I24) |
| decrease in real minimum wage (J38) | increase in BMI (I14) |