Generational effects and gender height dimorphism in contemporary Spain
Joan Costa-Font and
Joan Gil
Economics & Human Biology, 2008, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-18
Abstract:
We examine the influence of socio-environmental (and birth cohort specific) effects on both adult height and gender dimorphism (height gap). Our data set is from contemporary Spain, a country governed by an authoritarian regime for about 40 years. Both OLS and quantile regression approaches are used to examine these patterns. Furthermore, we then draw upon a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to explain the influence of socio-political environment in explaining gender dimorphism. Our findings point to a significant increase in adult height in the generations that benefited from the country's economic liberalization in the 1950s, and especially among those brought up after the transition to democracy in the 1970s. In contrast, individual heterogeneity suggests that only in recent generations has "height increased more among the tallest". We also find that the effects of education on height are greater among shorter individuals. Although the mean gender difference in height is 11.7Â cm, birth cohort and capabilities effects along with other controls explain on average roughly 4% of the gender height dimorphism, irrespective of the quantile considered.
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570-677X(07)00068-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
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:eee:ehbiol:v:6:y:2008:i:1:p:1-18
Access Statistics for this article
Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten
More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().