IQ and the Weight of Nations

Abstract

The antecedents of the ‘weights of nations’ have been in the center of theoretical and empirical discussion over the past decades. In this research, we contribute to extant studies by investigating the effect of general intelligence, measured by nation IQ, on the Body Mass Indices (BMI) of male and female populations for 187 countries of the world. Our results suggest an inverted U-shaped link between intelligence and BMI. Even after controlling for an alternative set of control variables such as trade openness, urbanization and others, our results remain intact. This paper documents a turning point of 80.8 for female and 83.7 IQ score for male BMI. The results remain robust to a number of robustness checks.

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