The pleasures of life are worth nothing if one is not alive to experience them. Through the twentieth century in the United States and other high-income countries, growth in real incomes was accompanied by a historically unprecedented decline in mortality rates that caused life expectancy at...

Mortality rates have fallen dramatically over time, starting in a few countries in the 18th century, and continuing to fall today. In just the past century, life expectancy has increased by over 30 years. At the same time, mortality rates remain much higher in poor countries, with a difference...

Health inequalities across socio-economic groups in the US are large and have been growing. We hypothesize that, as in other, non-health contexts, this pattern occurs because more educated people are better able to take advantage of technological advances in medicine than are the less educated....

Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between educa- tion and health, but there are difficulties in determining whether this relation- ship is causal. In this paper I reexamine whether education has a causal impact on health. I follow synthetic cohorts using successive...

Secondary schooling experienced incredible growth in the first 40 years of the 20th Century. Was legislation on compulsory attendance and child labor responsible for this growth? This paper analyzes a detailed set of laws, examining their effect on the entire distribution of education. It also...

This paper deals with a special case of estimation with grouped data, where the dependent variable is only available for groups, whereas the endogenous regressor(s) is available at the individual level. By estimating the first stage using the available individual data, and then estimating the...

This paper documents a counter-cyclical pattern in the health of children, and examines whether this pattern is due to selection among women choosing to give birth or to behavioral changes. We study the relationship between the unemployment rate at the time of a baby’s conception and parental...

There is a substantial literature arguing that financial development contributes to economic growth. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by examining the effect of state-level banking regulation on financial development and economic growth in the United States from 1900 to 1940....

Deaton and Lubotsky (2003) found that the robust positive relationship across American cities between mortality and income inequality became small, insignificant, and/or non-robust once they controlled for the fraction of each city’s population that is black. Ash and Robinson (Ash, M., &...