O'Neill, Donal and Sweetman, Olive (2013) The consequences of measurement error when estimating the impact of obesity on income. IZA Journal of Labour Economics, 2 (3). pp. 1-20.

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Abstract

This paper examines the consequences of using self-reported measures of BMI when estimating the effect of BMI on income for women using both Irish and US data. We find that self-reported BMI is subject to substantial measurement error and that this error deviates from classical measurement error. These errors cause the traditional least squares estimator to overestimate the relationship between BMI and income. We show that neither the conditional expectation estimator nor the instrumental variables approach adequately address the bias and briefly discuss alternative approaches that could be considered when faced with non-classical measurement error.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2013 O’Neill and Sweetman; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. O’Neill and Sweetman IZA Journal of Labor Economics 2013, 2:3 http://www.izajole.com/content/2/1/3
Keywords:	Obesity; Non-classical measurement error; Auxiliary data; Instrumental variables;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics, Finance and Accounting
Item ID:	4429
Depositing User:	Olive Sweetman
Date Deposited:	24 Jul 2013 16:25
Journal or Publication Title:	IZA Journal of Labour Economics
Publisher:	Springer
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://izajole.iza.org/
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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