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Height, Chest Size, and Household Composition in Late-Nineteenth-Century Catalonia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

Gregori Galofré-Vilà
Gregori Galofré-Vilà*
Affiliation:
Universidad Pública de Navarra, Department of Economics, and Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article measures the impact of early-life household composition on adult height and chest size in men born in Catalonia in the late nineteenth century. It combines data from military drafts with census records, observing the same individual twice over his lifetime. For family composition characteristics I control for the number of siblings, intergenesic interval, parental occupation and educational level, fatherless or motherless families, and other relatives living in the household. I show that taller individuals were more likely to come from well-off families and that men who grew up in orphanages or in motherless households were shorter than their counterparts. Results also uncover that there was a negative association between height and the number of siblings and the age gap between them. However, this negative association is driven by having more brothers (instead of sisters). If we are to gain a fuller understanding of the factors that have influenced height, we need to consider the composition of the household as an explanatory variable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 111 - 129
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Science History Association

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