IQ and the Weight of Nations

Raufhon Salahodjaev and Sardor Azam

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The antecedents of the ‘weights of nations’ have been in the center of theoretical and empirical discussion over the past decades. In this research, we contribute to extant studies by investigating the effect of general intelligence, measured by nation IQ, on the Body Mass Indices (BMI) of male and female populations for 187 countries of the world. Our results suggest an inverted U-shaped link between intelligence and BMI. Even after controlling for an alternative set of control variables such as trade openness, urbanization and others, our results remain intact. This paper documents a turning point of 80.8 for female and 83.7 IQ score for male BMI. The results remain robust to a number of robustness checks.

Keywords: IQ; health; obesity; BMI; globalization; trade openness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:66144

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