Physical Stature Decline and the Health Status of the Elderly Population in England

Alan Fernihough and Mark McGovern

Working Paper from Harvard University OpenScholar

Abstract: Few research papers in economics have examined the extent, causes or consequences of physical stature decline in aging populations. Using repeated observations on objectively measured data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we document that reduction in height is an important phenomenon among respondents aged 50 and over. On average, physical stature decline occurs at an annual rate of between 0.08% and 0.10% for males, and 0.12% and 0.14% for females?which approximately translates into a 2cm to 4cm reduction in height over the life course. Since height is commonly used as a measure of long-run health, our results demonstrate that failing to take age-related height loss into account substantially overstates the health advantage of younger birth cohorts relative to their older counterparts. We also show that there is an absence of consistent predictors of physical stature decline at the individual level. However, we demonstrate how deteriorating health and reductions in height occur simultaneously. We document that declines in muscle mass and bone density are likely to be the mechanism through which these effects are operating. If this physical stature decline is determined by deteriorating health in adulthood, the coefficient on measured height when used as an input in a typical empirical health production function will be affected by reverse causality. While our analysis details the inherent difficulties associated with measuring height in older populations, we do not find that significant bias arises in typical empirical health production functions from the use of height which has not been adjusted for physical stature decline. Therefore, our results validate the use of height among the population aged over 50.

Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://scholar.harvard.edu/mcgovern/node/143351

Related works:
Journal Article: Physical stature decline and the health status of the elderly population in England (2015)
Working Paper: A Tall Story: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences of Stature Loss (2013)
Working Paper: Physical Stature Decline and the Health Status of the Elderly Population in England
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:qsh:wpaper:143351

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Harvard University OpenScholar Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Richard Brandon ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).