Military technology and sample selection bias

Johan Fourie, Martine Mariotti and Kris Inwood

No 03/2018, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: While it is well known that labour market fluctuations may affect the supply of labour into particular activities such as crime and military service, other sources of selection bias may be sufficiently powerful to confound hypothesis testing. Selection into military populations, for example, may reflect influences on the demand as well as supply of labour. We argue that changing military technology in the early twentieth century shifted the demand for men of different stature and robustness. Soldiers in the First World War (1914-1918) were shorter on average than those in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) for reasons that had nothing to do with standard of living or business cycle influences on the labour market. Rather, we argue, the mechanization and bureaucratization of warfare increased the relative value of shorter people permitting a decline in the average height of soldiers. Thus, technological change over the period of these two wars affected labour demand in a way that largely explains an apparent fall in heights.

Keywords: height; stature; sample selection bias; convenience samples; World War I; Anglo-Boer War; military strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 N3 N4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2018/wp032018/wp032018.pdf First version, 2018 (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:sza:wpaper:wpapers296

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().