ABSTRACT
Investigation of many of the central aspects of the relationship between height and economic behavior await the completion of linkage of height records to additional sources of information on the mortality experience and wealth holdings of individual recruits at other points in their lives. The NBER Program in the Development of the American Economy has been pursuing a study of the usefulness of anthropometric measurements for the estimation and analysis of levels of nutrition, labor productivity, and labor welfare in historical populations. The increase in the gap between the heights of rural- and urban-born observed in the first half of the 19th century is an example of such a change over time in the relationship between height and socioeconomic variables. Whereas heights of the British and other European populations increased markedly between the first recorded evidence in the eighteenth century and today, the heights of Americans changed little between the American Revolution and World War II.
