The Tall and the Short of the Returns to Height

Michael Baker and Kirsten Cornelson

No 26325, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We revisit the US evidence of the association of height with socioeconomic status. We document non linear height profiles that are different for males and females. For males the profile is a spline function with a single node at mean height. Below mean height there is a sharply positive slope with height, while the function is roughly horizontal above the mean. For females the spline has two nodes. There is positive slope below mean height and in the top 10 percent of heights, and the profile is roughly horizontal between the mean and the 90th percentile. Remarkably, these stylized profiles describe the association of height with socioeconomic outcomes ranging from teenage cognitive scores to adult poverty, suggesting a common origin. We investigate some of the implications of these findings for analyses of the contributions of cognitive and non cognitive skills to the height profile in wages.

JEL-codes: I3 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lma
Note: CH LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26325.pdf (application/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:nbr:nberwo:26325

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26325

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).