The Effect of BMI and Height on Socio-Economic Status

Socio-economic status (SES) is correlated with better health and longer lifetime. The determinants of socio-economic status are, how- ever, unclear, as there are many observed and unobserved factors feed- ing back and forth and causing reverse causality. This paper aims to verify whether physical appearance, in the form of height and body mass index (BMI), has a causal eect on SES. Possible explanations of the phenomenon include discrimination on the labor market as well as health problems. To investigate this relationship, I use insights from genetic studies and the Mendelian randomization approach. In this, genes work as instrumental variables to mitigate the issues of reverse causality and omitted variables bias. Analyzing data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) focused on the elderly American popula- tion, I nd signicant causal eects of BMI for four out of six proxies of SES while height in uences income only. More specically, I nd that individuals with lower stature and higher BMI are at disadvantage for what concerns education and labor market outcomes.