Height and death in the Antebellum United States: A view through the lens of geographically weighted regression

Transportation and Health in the Antebellum United States, 1820–1847

“…I find evidence of a negative effect of market access on average stature that is large enough to explain 37 percent of the decline in average stature in my data. Evidence supporting such a relationship had previously been found (Cuff 2005;Haines, Craig, and Weiss 2003;Yoo 2012), but improvements in data availability (Atack 2013) and methods for the study of transportation (Donaldson and Hornbeck 2016) enable me to provide plausibly causal estimates where only suggestive correlations had previously been available. I also go beyond this existing research by providing evidence consistent with the contention that a mechanism for this effect was the role of transportation in increasing population density, which would have led to a deterioration in the epidemiological environment in a period of poor sanitation technology.…”

“…Thus, while Haines, Craig, and Weiss's (2003) results are consistent with transportation contributing to the antebellum decline in health, convincing causal evidence does not yet exist. Similar concerns constrain the related results of Cuff (2005) and Yoo (2012). Moreover, no prior evidence exists regarding the mechanism by which transportation may have affected health in this context.…”

“…The economic growth of the antebellum period was caused, in part, by a contemporaneous Transportation Revolution that transformed the American continent and economy by expanding transportation infrastructure into large areas that were previously unlinked and undeveloped (Taylor 1951). Although economic theory shows that the impact of transportation on health may be positive or negative, it has long been suspected that the antebellum transportation expansion may have contributed to the contemporaneous decline in health (Cuff 2005;Haines, Craig, and Weiss 2003;McGuire and Coelho 2011;Yoo 2012). But the effect of transportation on health in the antebellum United States remains empirically unclear because of data limitations (described by Atack 2013) and methodological constraints faced by prior research.…”

“…To describe the development of the transportation network in the antebellum United States, I use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) shape files created by Atack (2015Atack ( , 2016Atack ( , 2017, which provide the location and opening date of all canals, railroads, and steamboat-navigable waterways in the antebellum United States. This source marks an improvement over the transportation data available in previous investigations of the link between transport and health in the antebellum United States (Haines, Craig, and Weiss 2003;Yoo 2012), for which only approximations of the state of the transportation network in a single year were possible (Atack 2013). I use these data to compute Donaldson and Hornbeck's (2016) market access statistic for all counties east of the Mississippi River for each year 1820-1847, which is my main measure of transportation linkage.…”

“…For instance, local characteristics might have spurred economic growth, attracting transportation, affecting health, and creating a spurious relationship between the two. Two aspects of my analysis, made possible by the new data and methods that I use to measure transportation linkage, enable me to address these concerns to an extent not possible in prior studies of the link between transportation and health in the antebellum United States (Cuff 2005;Haines, Craig, and Weiss 2003;Yoo 2012). First, the panel structure of the data on a county's transport linkage enables me to estimate specifications that include county fixed effects, capturing location-specific characteristics that might create a spurious relationship between transportation and height.…”