Abstract: Economists have increasingly turned to height data to gain insight into a population’s standard of living. Because height measures are used when other data is unavailable, testing their reliability can be difficult, and concerns over sample selection have lead to several vigorous debates within the heights literature. In this paper, I use a unique contemporaneous census to gauge the extent of selection into a contested sample of American Indian heights. I have linked people from the 1892 Boas sample of the Cherokee Nation to the 1890 Cherokee...
(read more)