Does Obesity Lead to Poverty: Evidence from Russia

Student: Golubtsova Anastasiia

Supervisor: Dmitry Malakhov

Faculty: International College of Economics and Finance

Educational Programme: Double degree programme in Economics of the NRU HSE and the University of London (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2021

This paper is dedicated to the investigation of Body-Mass-Index influence on individual’s income, where the aim is to determine, whether weight discrimination is present in Russian labor market, leading overweight and obese people to earn significantly less than employees with normal weight, keeping all other parameters unchanged. The study is performed on the data from The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) collected by the Research University Higher School of Economics on both cross-sectional and panel datasets on individuals in the time interval from the year 2010 to 2019. The main issue to be resolved in the research was to construct valid instrument for BMI in order to break endogeneity in the relation between income and BMI, and to obtain consistent estimates, which would allow to answer the research question reliably. Based on estimation results, it was detected that income is expected to fall by approximately 300 rubles or 2.1% per month with an increase in BMI by 1 point ceteris paribus, which made us draw the conclusion that obesity does lead to poverty in Russia.

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