TY  - JOUR
AU  - Meltzer, David O
AU  - Chen, Zhuo
TI  - The Impact of Minimum Wage Rates on Body Weight in the United States
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15485
PY  - 2009
Y2  - November 2009
DO  - 10.3386/w15485
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15485
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15485.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Meltzer
Section of Hospital Medicine
University of Chicago
5841 S. Maryland, MC 5000
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/702-0836
Fax: 773/735-7398
E-Mail: dmeltzer@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu

Zhuo (Adam) Chen
Office of Workforce and Career Development
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Rd NE, MS-E94
Atlanta, GA 30333
Tel: 404-498-6317
Fax: 404-498-6505
E-Mail: fov7@cdc.gov
M1  - published as David O. Meltzer, Zhuo Chen. "The Impact of Minimum Wage Rates on Body Weight in the United States," in Michael Grossman and Naci H. Mocan, editors, "Economic Aspects of Obesity" University of Chicago Press (2011)

M3  - presented at "Economic Aspects of Obesity", November 10-11, 2008
AB  - 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.
ER  -