Anthropometric Dividends of Czechoslovakia's Break Up

J. Costa-Font and L. Kossarova

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: Processes of transition to democracy and country break up stand out as ideal experiments to estimate the impact of wide institutional reform on well-being. Changes in population heights are regarded as virtuous pointers of well-being improvements in psycho-social environments, which improve with democracy. We analyzed a unique dataset containing individual heights in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to measure the retrospective well-being effects of the two transitions to liberal democracy and capitalism after the split up of Czechoslovakia. An additional year spent under democracy increases height by 0.286cm for Slovaks and 0.148cm for Czechs. Results were robust to using an alternative dataset and suggest that although transition paths differ across the two countries, the absolute height gap between Slovaks and the Czechs did not change. Slovaks benefited more thanthe Czechs in the bottom and mid tercile.

Keywords: height; democracy; transition; secession; Czechoslovakia; Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition; height dimorphism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/hedg/workingpapers/1504.pdf Main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Anthropometric dividends of Czechoslovakia’s break up (2014)
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:yor:hectdg:15/04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York HEDG/HERC, Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Rawlings ().