Anthropometric Dividends of Czechoslovakia’s Break Up

Joan Costa-i-Font and Lucia Kossarova

LEQS – LSE 'Europe in Question' Discussion Paper Series from European Institute, LSE

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 wellbeing 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. Results were robust to using an alternative dataset and suggest that 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)
Date: 2015-06
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:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/LEQS/LEQSPaper95.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/LEQS/LEQSPaper95.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/LEQS/LEQSPaper95.pdf)

Related works:
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:eiq:eileqs:95

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LEQS – LSE 'Europe in Question' Discussion Paper Series from European Institute, LSE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katjana Gattermann (euroinst.leqs@lse.ac.uk).