GLP1s for weight loss impact lives beyond health. My new paper shows single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise 29pp, employment among nonemployed women rises 27 percentage points after 1.5+ years.
Link to paper below:
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This is a super interesting paper, Rebecca.
Who’s in the group that was unemployed yet started a GLP1? These drugs are pricey, so I’m wondering what these folks look like at baseline.
This is not a good methodology. Women probably get serious about getting on weight loss drugs when they’re feeling ambitious or trying to fit into a wedding dress.
Here's the bottom line for those interested: impact is driven by improved first impressions.
Ran the entire paper through Claude. Some of the results are counterintuitive and interesting.
Very interesting analysis! For the labor market results, how can you rule out reverse causality? Couldn’t it be the case that becoming employed provides women with the economics means to purchase GLP-1 agonists (given that these drugs are quite expensive)?
I'm confused, what does it mean in practice for these study participants to be 29pp more likely to be married or cohabiting? Does this mean they got married or are less likely to get divorced? If it's the latter, did you ask any participants what changed about their relationship?
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Do people that lost significant weight without GLP have similar life improvements? Isn’t this just showing that fitter people do better in dating and employment?
The obesity crises absolutely wrecked dating and relationships for millennials.
It made the majority of women unattractive and made it so only a small amount of thin women were really desirable.
This led to those women getting insane amounts of attention and wildly inflated
So 29% rise in marriage/cohab & 27% rise in employment from losing a meager 9.8% body weight & still having an obese bmi at study end? Leaves me more than a bit incredulous
Don’t need a paper when Veeto already told you
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Anyone trying to figure out how to improve fertility rates and not mentioning how the average American woman is 5’4 170 does not understand men any better than a 4yr old does.
moneyness increases… interesting
do you have data on getting divorce? like i can’t wrap my head around the cost of divorce controlled for or not.
women moneyness increases and men don’t change => makes divorce less costly for women. (expected).
so, if the GLP1 increases
A difference if 1 bmi is much more noticeable in women due to lower muscle mass. Men can "sense" how big a woman is in their peripheral vision.
So - what you’re saying is that ladies who were slim and single BEFORE GLP-1s hit the scene are irredeemably crazy?
is not using color an economics paper thing? It makes the graphs hard to read. Other fields do use color, wasn't sure if this is because of the field or personal choice?
How did you manage confounding by indication? This looks like the mother of all healthy user biases
Would be interested in seeing a placebo comparison here. I expect to see some of this as an artefact of splitting the sample in the pre-period between single/partnered & employed/unemployed.
But, GLP1s are great & these sort of benefits seem plausible!
Interesting and believable. Though I wonder about confounding if marriage odds go up even at year zero. Might single women who start GLP-1 also be more determined to get married than singles who don’t & parterned ones who do? Any data on non-GLP1s less effective weight loss meds?
Was there any data to show change in partner, infidelity rates, etc. too?
Any data on GLP1s and a relationship to religious service attendance and/or religious identification?
Fascinating study, with some careful attempts at controls. The marriage or cohabitating effect is so large I would be curious how it looks after age stratification
Also shows that the reproductive crisis is due to men. They are selecting women based on certain BMIs for long term relationships while the men lose weight and nothing changes.
Interesting! Did you look at the effects for men? Are they similar?
The narrative has always been that "incels" cannot get girlfriends becasue women rule the narrative with their natural gossip brains, but the truth has always been that men don't chase fat women, even when they make up 65% of our nation.
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