If you want to cite the height collection data on the last 500 years done by Jörg Baten and his colleagues, the best citation would be this article by Baten and Blum (2012): 

 “Why are you tall while others are short? Agricultural production and other proximate determinants of global heights”, with Matthias Blum, European Review of Economic History 18 (2014), 144–165.

In the following, we provide some individual level data sets which might be helpful to obtain comparative data.

We provide a substantial amount of country- and decade-specific data under:

www.clio-infra.eu

Also data concerning heigth inequality can be found.

The recent publication by Steckel, Larsen, Roberts and Baten (2019), "The European Backbone"
is documented here with the underlying data:

https://economics.osu.edu/european-module

Data on heights and the biological standard of living are among the most important sources of information in social- and economic-historical research, especially for the pre-statistical period. The International Economic History Association has taken the initiative to set up a network of scholars working with this kind of data and establish a moderated list of datafiles of historical heights. Scholars working in this field are invited to register their work, and to make their data bases available through the internet - either on their own webpages (which may be made accessible via this list) or on our webpages.

It is also possible to send a data set with the obligation that we make it available only in two or three years after the first major publication. For example, those who created a very large data set might want to use it not only for one, but for two or three publications. Those who are interested in re-using it will still be very interested in this information and it is important to have a reliable time fram. The long term goal is to enhance the exchange and (re-)use of these data in order to write truly international-comparative histories of the development of welfare and their determinants and consequences. All data bases will not only include the data themselves, but also descriptions of the way in which they are constructed, the sources which are used, and relevant publications in which the data are analysed.

 

Worldwide

Worldwide estimates of height by country and birth decade, Paper and Excel file

If you use this evidence, please inform us at joerg.batenspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de and cite: Blum, Matthias and Joerg Baten.  “Why are you tall while others are short? Agricultural production and other proximate determinants of global heights”, with Matthias Blum, European Review of Economic History 18 (2014), 144–165.

Germany

Heights of bavarian male conscripts, 19th century
- Author: Jörg Baten
- About this datafile
- The datafile: SPSS (zipped)

German male conscripts in Bavaria (Baten 1999)

- Author: Jörg Baten

- The datafile (.zip): STATA (zipped)

German male prisoners (Baten 1999)

- Author: Jörg Baten

- The datafile (.zip): STATA (zipped)

Heights of south-east and south-west german soldiers born in the 18th century

- Author: Jörg Baten
- About this datafile
- The datafile: SPSS (zipped)

Anthropometric, demographic and economic data on 200 bavarian regions
- Author: Jörg Baten
- About this datafile
- The datafile: SPSS (zipped)
 

USA

- Organisation: National Bureau of Economic research
- Link to the National Bureau of Economic research (NBER)

- The Measure of Man and Older Age Mortality: Evidence from the Gould Sample
- Author: Dora L. Costa
- About this datafile
- Link to the Gould Sample data
 

Developing Countries

- Organisation: Measure DHS+
- About this datafile
- Link to Demographic and Health Survey

 

Czech male prisoners (Hodinova 2007)

- The datafile (.zip): STATA (zipped)

North Italian soldiers and deserters (Meineke 2008)

- The datafile (.zip): STATA (zipped)

 

Data formats

Excel is our standard format, but as some data sets contain 100000s of cases, the SPSS format is also used. If you want to use SPSS files in another format, you could import them into STATA. You can also try out the SPSS evaluation license for 30 days: 

SPSS download for 30 days (evaluation license)