'Replication data for: Overweight and Overburdened: Race and Gender Disparities in the Incidence of the Healthcare Costs of Obesity

Abstract The incidence of medical costs of obesity disproportionately falls on women and racial minorities. Prior research has shown that when employers provide health insurance coverage to workers, the additional healthcare costs associated with obesity are passed through to obese workers in the form of reduced wages, relative to their non-obese counterparts. However, estimation of a population-level wage penalty of obesity obscures substantial variation in the relative impact of these wage differences by race and gender. We partition the 1979 NLSY data by race and gender, and find that while the dollar-denominated wage penalty borne by obese workers with health insurance is borne predominantly by white women, these wage offsets disproportionately impact blacks and white women when modeled as a percentage of income. Upload includes data, R code, and write-up