Health, Height, Height Shrinkage and SES at Older Ages: Evidence from China

John Strauss will discuss his work on aging in China at the University of Southern California.

Paper co-authors:
Wei Huang - Harvard University
Xiaoyan Lei - Peking University
Geert Ridder - University of Southern California
John Strauss - University of Southern California
Yaohui Zhao - Peking University

We would like to thank helpful advice and suggestions from Janet Currie, David Cutler, Richard Freeman, Anastasia Gage, Amanda Kowalski, T. Paul Schultz and Yi Zeng. We are also indebted to the comments from Paul Frijters at the 32nd Conference for Australian Health Economists, Yiqing Xu at the 1st CCER Academic Conference, three discussants at the 10th China Economic Annual and suggestions from all the participants in CCER labor workshop. We are responsible
for all remaining errors and omissions.

This research is supported by National Institute of Aging, the Natural Science Foundation of China, Fogarty International Center, the World Bank, and the Peking University?Morgan Stanley Scholarship.

Paper Abstract:
Adult height, as a marker of childhood health, has recently become a focus in understanding the relationship between childhood health and health outcomes at older ages. However, measured height of the older individuals is contaminated by height shrinkage from aging. Height shrinkage, in turn may be correlated with health conditions and socio-economic status from throughout the life-cycle. In this case it would be problematic to use measured height directly in regressions without considering such an e¤ect. In this paper, we tackle this problem by using upper arm length and lower leg length to estimate a pre-shrinkage height function for a younger population that should not have started their shrinkage. We then use these estimated coe¢ cients to predict pre-shrinkage heights for an older population, for which we also have upper arm and lower leg lengths. We then estimate height shrinkage for this older population and examine the associations between shrinkage and socio-economic status variables. We provide evidence that height shrinkage for both men and women is negatively associated with better current SES and early life conditions and, for women, positively with pre-shrinkage height. We then investigate the relationships between pre-shrinkage height, height shrinkage and a rich set of health outcomes of older respondents, ?nding that height shrinkage is positively associated with poor health outcomes across a variety of outcomes. The results for older age cognition are especially strong.