Living standards and the distribution of heights: Italy, 1855-1910

A’Hearn, Brian, Franco Peracchi () and Giovanni Vecchi ()
Additional contact information
A’Hearn, Brian: Franklin & Marshall College

No 229, Working Papers from Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing.

Abstract: Mean heights are often used to measure living standards for times and places in which other economic indicators are not available. We propose a novel approach to modeling the distribution of heights, which does not rely on common but often-unwarranted assumptions such as normality. We construct a new database of height distributions for 69 Italian provinces for birth cohorts from 1855 to 1910 and apply our method to control for changes in age at measurement, selection effects due to emigration, and transitory data errors. Analysis of our corrected height distributions yields new insights into the evolution of living standards during Italy’s unification and transition to modern economic growth.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Date: 2007-04
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~chw/papers/peracchi_franco_draft12_rev2.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by David Long ().