Wage Gains Associated with Height as a Form of Health Human Capital

• Published in: The American economic review Vol. 92; no. 2; pp. 349 - 353
• Main Author: Schultz, T. Paul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nashville American Economic Association 01.05.2002
• Subjects: Adults; Age; Bias; Biology; Children; Children & youth; Childrens health; Comparative analysis; Economic inequality; Economic theory; Education; Educational attainment; Endowment; Estimates; Factor analysis; Families & family life; Food prices; Height; Households; Human capital; Human genetics; Infrastructure; Labor productivity; Medical genetics; Men; Nutrition; Parents; Parents & parenting; Prices; Productivity; Statistical analysis; The Role of Nature versus Nurture in Determining Economic Outcomes; Variables; Wages; Wages & salaries; Brazil; United States > US; Ghana
• ISSN: 0002-8282; 1944-7981
• DOI: 10.1257/000282802320191598

In studies of the effect of health on labor productivity, it has been assumed that adult height, a latent measure of health status, is homogeneous, measured without error, and exogenous with respect to an individual's wage. These assumptions are reexamined using instrumental-variable (IV) estimates of wage functions based on household surveys from Ghana, Brazil, and the US. Several sets of instruments (IV's) related to height, which are hypothesized to capture different combinations of behavioral and biological mechanisms associated with the human capital and genetic variation in height. Adult height is a curious measure of the relative risk of survival, of general health status and labor productivity. Height appears to comprise many sources of variation, which do not appear to have the same proportional association with wages. In cross section, components of height associate with price, education, income and public services are highly correlated with wages, while the residual variation in height that is not explained by these socioeconomic variables is weakly linked to wages.