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comparing the recently to the non-recently married couples. The average number of
children for the former group is half the size of the latter, the spouses’ ages are lower,
while the education of the wife and her earnings are higher for recently married. While
BMI and weight appear to be only slightly higher for couples in longer marriages, the
slightly smaller averages in height for these couples may reveal a cohort effect.
Table 2 shows three main patterns. First, there seems to be positive sorting in
BMI: in 60% of recently married couples, both the wife and the husband have a BMI
above or below the median BMI corresponding to their respective BMI distributions.
Indeed, the correlation between husband’s and wife’s BMI is 0.3740 (p-value = 0.0000),
see Table 13. Second, almost 30% of recently married couples consist of a thin wife and
a high-earnings husband, 20% of a thin wife and a low-earnings husband, while the
remaining 50% consists of a heavier wife and a low- or high-earnings husband. The
correlation between husband’s log earnings and wife’s BMI is –0.1578 (p-value =
0.0000), see Table 13. Finally, nearly 60% of recently married couples are composed of
either a high-educated husband and a thin wife (29.2%) or a low-educated husband and
a heavier wife (almost 27%). The correlation between husband’s education and wife’s
BMI is –0.2126 (p-value = 0.0000), see Table 13.
3. Results
3.1 Main Findings
In Table 3 we present the results of several regressions where the dependent variable is
the wife’s BMI by marital duration. Starting from the baseline specification, which
controls only for husband’s BMI and wife’s age, we run a “horse-race” sequentially
adding several characteristics of both the wife and the husband.
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