Racial gap in the Distribution of Body Mass Index in the United States from 1987- 2011

What explains the body mass index gap among racial groups over the last several decades? Prior research suggests that the socioeconomic disadvantaged position of minorities explains why non-Hispanic Blacks have higher prevalence of obesity than non-Hispanic Whites. The explanation is plausible and is supported by empirical evidence, but it is still not conclusive. First, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that the income distribution has changed dramatically within and across racial groups in the last several decades. How is changing in the distribution of income associated with the changing in distribution of BMI among racial group over period is still not clear.Secondly, existing literature mainly examines the association between covariates of interest and mean BMI by using OLS regression based analysis. There is little research pays attention to how socioeconomic status is associated with the relative position in the distribution of BMI. In addition, the distribution of BMI has changing over time across racial groups. In this research, I will apply quantile regression to estimate the association between socioeconomic status and the quantiles of BMI. Second, I will apply oaxaca-like decomposition to separate the changing gap in BMI distribution across racial groups into two factors: the difference in magnitude of covari