TY - JOUR AU - Bleakley, Hoyt AU - Costa, Dora AU - Lleras-Muney, Adriana TI - Health, Education and Income in the United States, 1820-2000 JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19162 PY - 2013 Y2 - June 2013 DO - 10.3386/w19162 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19162 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19162.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Hoyt Bleakley University of Michigan Department of Economics 611 Tappan 218 Lorch Hall Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220 E-Mail: hoytb@umich.edu Dora Costa Bunche Hall 9272 Department of Economics UCLA Box 951477 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477 Tel: (310) 825-4249 Fax: (310) 825-9528 E-Mail: costa@econ.ucla.edu Adriana Lleras-Muney Department of Economics 9373 Bunche Hall UCLA Los Angeles, CA 90095 Tel: 310/825-3925 Fax: NA E-Mail: allerasmuney@gmail.com M1 - published as Hoyt Bleakley, Dora Costa, Adriana Lleras-Muney. "Health, Education, and Income in the United States, 1820–2000," in Leah Platt Boustan, Carola Frydman, and Robert A. Margo, editors, "Human Capital in History: The American Record" University of Chicago Press (2014) M3 - presented at "Human Capital and History: The American Record", December 7-8, 2012 AB - We document the correlations between early childhood health (as proxied by height) and educational attainment and investigate the labor market and wealth returns to height for United States cohorts born between 1820 and 1990. The nineteenth century was characterized by low investments in height and education, a small correlation between height and education, and positive but small returns for both height and education. The relationship between height and education was stronger in the twentieth century and stronger in the first part of the twentieth century than later on (when both investments in education and height stalled), but never as strong as in developing countries. The labor market and wealth returns to height and education also were higher in the twentieth compared to the nineteenth century. We relate our findings to the theory of human capital formation and speculate that the greater importance of physical labor in the nineteenth century economy, which raised the opportunity cost of schooling, may have depressed the height-education relationship relative to the twentieth century. Our findings are consistent with an increasing importance of cognitive abilities acquired in early childhood. ER -