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The first specification shows a strong correlation between the BMIs of recently
married (less than 3 years) couples, only controlling for wife’s age. The same regression
for non-recently married couples follows and shows a smaller association between
spouses’ BMIs. This difference is observed across all the specifications. We do not
control for the age of both spouses, since these two are strongly correlated (between 0.8
for the recently married couples and 0.9 for the non-recently ones). Moreover, we only
include a linear term in age of the wife. Even if we add a quadratic in age of the wife,
we do not find age effects.
In the second specification, we add state, year and state-year fixed effects, while
in the following ones we sequentially add several characteristics of both the wife and
the husband: spouses’ log earnings, then number of children and health status, finally
completed education of both spouses. The corresponding estimated coefficients
highlight three important features. First, the strong correlation between spouses’ BMIs
persists. For recently married couples, the coefficient on the husband’s BMI stays fairly
constant across specifications at around 0.40, while it decreases from 0.31 to 0.26 for
spouses with longer duration of marriage. Second, the husband’s education is negatively
associated with his wife’s BMI, and the association is more negative for recently
married couples than for the non-recently married. Third, the husband’s earnings are
also negatively associated with his wife’s BMI, and its magnitude is larger for recently
married couples. This evidence shows that the correlation of spouses’ BMIs decreases
with the duration of their marriage, which suggests that, if anything, there is divergence
in BMIs. Moreover, this comparison also shows that the correlation between husband’s
earnings and wife’s BMI only slightly decreases with the duration of marriage. It is
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