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Abstract
This paper considers whether short-term variation in exposure to disease early in life, as measured by a variety of mortality rates, has an effect on the height of young adults. Height information for men born in southern Sweden, 1814–1948, and included in the Scanian Economic Demographic Database (SEDD), was obtained from records of medical inspections carried out as part of Sweden’s system of universal conscription. Community-level infant mortality rates were calculated not only by year of birth but also for time in utero and in the first year of life. Comparison between brothers was used to remove the influence of confounding factors. The results suggest that any effect that exposure to disease in early life, as measured by mortality rates, may have had on height, either through selection or scarring, is likely to have been very weak.
Supplementary material for this article is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2015.1045545
Notes
1 Stefan Öberg is at the Department of Economy and Society, Unit for Economic History, University of Gothenberg, Box 720, SE-404 30 Göteborg, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]
2 I would like to thank the members of the Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, for their collaboration and support. My thanks also go to this journal’s anonymous reviewers, participants at the 2013 British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference, participants in the seminar I gave at the Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, in April 2013, and my colleagues at the PhD student seminar at the Unit for Economic History, University of Gothenburg. I am also grateful to Martin Dribe, Sören Edvinsson, Bernard Harris, and Christer Lundh for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to Luciana Quaranta for helping me when I became lost in the calculations.