IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ese/iserwp/2025-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Returns to testosterone across men’s earnings distribution in the UK

Author

Listed:
  • Kanabar, Ricky
  • Eibich, Peter
  • Plum, Alexander

Abstract

We study how population variation in testosterone levels impacts male labour market earnings using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study between 2011 and 2013. We exploit genetic variation between individuals as instrumental variables following a Mendelian Randomization approach to address the endogeneity of testosterone levels. Our findings show that higher testosterone levels have a strong positive impact on earnings. Importantly, these findings are limited to men belonging to the lower quartile of the testosterone distribution and working in higher-paid jobs. We show that differences within rather than between occupations drive these findings, whereas we find limited support for selection into occupation or mechanisms involving individual characteristics, including personality traits and education.

Suggested Citation

  • Kanabar, Ricky & Eibich, Peter & Plum, Alexander, 2025. "Returns to testosterone across men’s earnings distribution in the UK," ISER Working Paper Series 2025-02, Institute for Social and Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:ese:iserwp:2025-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/working-papers/iser/2025-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ese:iserwp:2025-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jonathan Nears (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rcessuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.