The Returns on an Additional Inch, for Men

Schick and Steckel

It used to make sense that height would be valued when picking people to do jobs: The tallest people were often the biggest and the strongest, and most tasks demanded size and strength. But the height premium has persisted even as more and more jobs have become desk jobs. Economists have sought a satisfactory explanation ever since that change started taking hold.

The beginning of this scholarship (at least in the U.S.) was NYU professor Enoch Burton Gowin’s The Executive and His Control of Men: A Study in Personal Efficiency, published in 1915. Gowin’s data collection revealed not just the difference between the heights of executives and “average men,” but also that bishops tended to be taller than preachers, and sales managers taller than the salespeople reporting to them.

Since the publication of Gowin’s book, researchers proposed a few possible explanations for why taller people attained white-collar jobs at higher rates. Some studies suggested that taller people have better social skills and more self-confidence (“noncognitive” skills, as academics would say). People who were taller as children, the thinking goes, were treated better, so they developed more emotional stability, which has been shown to help on the job. Meanwhile, other studies have found that taller people are inherently smarter: As early as age three, they do better on aptitude tests.

According to a new paper, the answer was a little bit of everything. The paper’s two authors, Andreas Schick, an economist at the FDA, and Richard Steckel, an economist at the Ohio State University, analyzed data from the United Kingdom tracking a group of Britons born in 1958 and concluded that neither cognitive nor noncognitive advantages can alone explain the earnings difference. Since both play significant roles in producing the height premium, they argue, the truly important variable is how well-fed a child is. Nutrition is a major deciding factor when it comes to height, which in turn means it affects intelligence and those highly helpful “noncognitive” skills.

In addition to performing those calculations, Schick and Steckel also came away with some correlations that, while not inconsistent with previous research, are still striking. For every two-inch increase in a child’s height, the improvement on cognitive and noncognitive assessments is roughly equivalent to the difference between growing up in a lower-class family and a middle-class family. And it’s not just height in childhood that goes on to shape future earnings: 11-year-old boys who were considered “attractive” (creepily enough, these ratings were determined by teachers) went on to make 6.5 percent more money in their thirties than their more homely peers did. For girls, it was a 10 percent boost.