The height production function from birth to maturity

Elisabetta De Cao

No 2014-31, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Height is the result of a complex process of growth that begins at birth and reaches the end in early adulthood. This paper studies the determinants of height from birth to maturity. A height production function is specified whose structure allows height to be the result of the accumulation of inputs (i.e., nutrition and diseases) over time. The empirical specification allows the causal identification of the age specific effects of both nutrition and diseases on height. Rich longitudinal data on Filipino children followed for more than 20 years are used. Considering the differences in growth patterns between boys and girls, the results show the existence of two critical periods for the formation of height: infancy and pre-puberty. In particular, diseases experienced during infancy, specially in the second year of life, and nutrition during pre-puberty play a major role.

Keywords: height; health; early-life events; production function; Philippines (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 I10 I12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6c0621e8-eb13-40f4-bd56-1a5369b9aa4d (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The height production function from birth to maturity (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2014-31

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().