The Height of Union Army Recruits

Abstract This chapter investigates family and community influences on adult height using newly collected data on Union Army recruits. In addition to providing new estimates for family and community influences on adult height using ordinary least squares (OLS), the analysis employs a variety of alternative specifications. It explores potential differences between urban and rural populations and across occupational categories. The analysis also estimates the model using county-level fixed effects and compares these results to the OLS equations. Finally, it estimates the main specification using quantile regression, a technique that has received increasing recognition as a method of exploring the impact of covariates on the entire conditional distribution of the dependent variable (in this case, height), rather than simply estimating the conditional mean, which is what OLS achieves.