Stephanie Coffey and Amy Ellen Schwartz
Do tall students do better in school? While a robust literature documents higher earnings among taller people, we know little about the potential academic origins of the height earnings gradient. In this paper, we use unique student-level longitudinal data from New York City (NYC) to examine the link between height and academic outcomes, shedding light on underlying mechanisms. The centerpiece of our empirical work is a regression linking academic outcomes to height, measured as a z-score normalized to same grade/sex peers within schools. We estimate a meaningful height gradient for both boys and girls in ELA and math achievement in all grades 3-8. Controlling for observed student characteristics, a one standard deviation (sd) increase in height for grade is associated with 3.1% (3.9%) sd higher performance in math (ELA) for boys and 3.6% (4.1%) sd for girls. While the average gradient is small in magnitude, it is sufficiently large to generate meaningful differences in achievement between the tallest and shortest students. The tallest boys (girls) within grade perform 13.8% (17%) sd better in math and 17.1% (18.8%) sd better in ELA relative to the shortest. Further, time-invariant student characteristics correlated with height and achievement explain roughly half of the relationship for boys (3/4 for girls). We also find evidence that ordinal height rank relative to peers may have a small effect on achievement conditional on cardinal height. Thus, there is an academic height premium for both absolute and relative height.
Presented by:
Professor Amy Ellen Schwartz
Date & time:
28 Feb 2024 14:00 pm - 28 Feb 2024 15:00 pm
Venue:
Online - to join us online, please contact the seminar series organisers at iserseminars@essex.ac.uk.
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