워킹페이퍼

  This paper examines how socioeconomic differences in health change with improvements in economic and environmental conditions in South Korea. Using a newly-collected 0.5% random sample of military records for all males born from 1946 to 1957, I found that the socioeconomic disparity in health increased across birth cohorts. No advantages of having high-class fathers were observed for the cohorts born prior to the Korean War. The differences in height according to father’s occupation emerged for the conscripts who were conceived or born during the Korean War; and the disparity became larger in magnitude for the post-war birth cohorts. A possible explanation for the result is that socioeconomic differences in parental investments in children reduced over time. However, unlike the results from height regressions, the differences in schooling according to father’s occupation remained little changed across birth cohorts, which tends to reject the hypothesis. Another possible hypothesis is that health shocks (such as exposure to war-caused disruptions, natural disasters, infectious diseases, and so on) could weaken the effects of different parental investments, and that such shocks were more prevalent prior the end of the Korean War. In support of the hypothesis, I found that the socioeconomic disparity in adult height among the cohorts born prior to 1952 was more weakly revealed for conscripts from the central region that was hit harder by the Korean War than those from the southern region.