The advantage of being tall

It is well known that tall people have more success on the labor market, see for example T. Paul Schultz. The big question is whether this is due to discimination, say, because tall people are considered more beautiful, or because being tall is a signal of other positive characteristics. Schultz, for example, has highlighted that being tall is a sign of health.

The articles of Anne Case and Christina Paxson in the Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Review detail how tall people have actually more cognitive abilities. It is not because the air is better higher up, it has to do, they demonstrate, with the fact that children that are taller at age 3, before school had any influence, already show better cognitive skills. Jere Behrman and Mark Rosenzweig also demonstrated that higher birth weights lead to better school attainment. This just reinforces the point that James Heckman has been pushing so hard, that schooling and labor market outcomes are to a large extend determined even before children are going to school.

In economies where nutrition is more important for developmental issues, Carl-Johan Dalgaard and Holger Strulik show with an intriguing biologically micro-founded model that tall people have distinct labor market advantages: They have higher wages and are less unemployed. It is, however, not clear whether this can translate to an economy with little food security issues.

What prompted me to write about this? Reading about tall people being upset at so-called discrimination in some airlines. Indeed, some of the latter are charging a fee for the priviledge of sitting in the front row or on an exit row where the legroom is larger. Tall people view this as a tax against them. In fact, one should tax them, as shown by Tomer Blumkin, Yoram Margalioth and Efraim Sadka, and as such tax does not exist, they should count themselves lucky. And by the way, if tall people need those seats so badly, why would they not pay for them? And if they are more expensive, they are less likely to be taken by short people.