Anthropometric dividends of Czechoslovakia’s break up

Joan Costa-Font and Lucia Kossarova

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Processes of transition to democracy and country break up stand out as ideal experiments to estimate the impact of wide institutional reform on well-being. Changes in population heights are regarded as virtuous pointers of well-being improvements in psycho-social environments, which improve with democracy. We analyzed a unique dataset containing individual heights in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to measure the retrospective well-being effects of the two transitions to liberal democracy and capitalism after the split up of Czechoslovakia. An additional year spent under democracy increases height by 0.286cm for Slovaks and 0.148cm for Czechs. Although transition paths differ across the two countries, the absolute height gap between Slovaks and the Czechs did not change. Slovaks benefited more than the Czechs in the bottom and mid tercile.

Keywords: height; democracy; transition; secession; Czechoslovakia; Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition; height dimorphism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60719/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Anthropometric Dividends of Czechoslovakia's Break Up (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:60719

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