This research argues that deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the contemporary era. It advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the...

Rates of childhood obesity have increased dramatically in the last few decades. Non-causal evidence suggests that childhood obesity is highly persistent over the life cycle. However little in known about the origins of this persistence. In this paper we attempt to answer three questions. First,...

We use nine waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to investigate the large labor market height premium observed in the BHPS, where each inch of height is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in wages, for both men and women. We find that half of the premium can be explained by the...

We examine the height of non-Hispanic US-born children born 1942-2002 on the basis of all NHES and NHANES data sets available. We use the CDC 2000 reference values to convert height into Height-for-Age z-scores stratified by gender. We decompose deviations from the reference values into an...