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value 1 if the individual’s BMI is below 18.5 and 0 otherwise, and we regress it on<br />
spousal obesity and other wife’s and husband’s characteristics. The findings in Table 9<br />
suggest that underweight husbands are less likely to have obese wives. At the same<br />
time, high-earnings husbands are less likely to have obese wives but more likely to have<br />
underweight ones. Hence, we cannot reject the hypothesis that for women being thinner<br />
(even underweight) is better. Finally, note that the percentage of underweight men is<br />
extremely small. Indeed, there are only 10 husbands who are underweight in recently<br />
married couples (3 years or less), and only 17 underweight husbands in non-recently<br />
married couples (more than 3 years). As Table 10 shows, we do not have enough<br />
variation in the dependent variable to detect any systematic pattern. Hence, we cannot<br />
say much about the hypothesis that for men being thinner (even underweight) is better 5 .<br />
We also explore the extent of sorting and trade-offs between anthropometric and<br />
socio-economic characteristics in cohabiting couples. In the PSID, cohabitants are<br />
reported as couples only after their first year of cohabitation, so that for both cohabitants<br />
anthropometric measures are reported for those who have been living together for more<br />
than a year. However, in the US cohabiting couples are found to be less stable than<br />
married couples. This may have implications on the reliability of the reported partner’s<br />
characteristics by the head. In particular, concerning anthropometric measures, it<br />
appears to be the case that in the US “proxy-respondents in married couples” (i.e.,<br />
individuals reporting their spouses’ characteristics) are more reliable than those in<br />
unmarried couples (Reither and Utz, 2009). The results for these cohabiting couples are<br />
5 Finally, to explore the potential non-monotonicity of the spousal BMI relationship over the BMI<br />
distribution, we have re-estimated column (1) in Tables 3 and 4 using spousal weight categories<br />
(“underweight” (BMI below 18.5), “overweight” (BMI between 25 and 29.99), and “obese” (BMI 30 and<br />
above)) rather than spousal BMI. Our findings did not show any evidence of a non-monotonic<br />
relationship.<br />
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