This paper explores the relationship between adult heights and the distribution of income across populations of individuals. There is a long literature that examines the relationship between mean adult heights and living standards. If adult height is set by the balance between food intake and charges to disease in early childhood, it is informative about economic and epidemiological conditions in childhood. Because taller populations are better-off, more productive, and live longer, the relationship between childhood conditions and adult height has become an important focus in the study of the relationship between health and wealth. Here I follow one of the tributaries of this main stream. A relationship between income and height at the individual level has implications for the effects of income inequality on the distribution of heights. These relationships parallel, but are somewhat more concrete than, the various relationships between income inequality and health that have been debated in the economic and epidemiological literatures, Richard G. Wilkinson (1996), Angus Deaton (2003).
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Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing. in its series Working Papers with number
1125.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement I00 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General - - - General I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
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