Policy-makers worldwide are embarking on school programmes aimed at boosting students' resilience. One facet of resilience is a belief about cause and effect in life, locus of control. I test whether positive control beliefs work as a psychological buffer against health shocks in adulthood. To...

We investigate the impact of obstetrician supervision, as opposed to midwife supervision, on the short-term health of low-risk newborns. We exploit a unique policy rule in the Netherlands that creates a large discontinuity in the probability of a low-risk birth being attended by an obstetrician...

In this paper, we study the short-run effect of salary receipt on mortality among Swedish public sector employees. By exploiting variation in pay-days across work-places, we completely control for mortality patterns related to, for example, public holidays and other special days or events...

We examine a new general class of hazard rate models for survival data, containing a parametric and a nonparametric component. Both can be a mix of a time effect and (possibly time-dependent) marker or covariate effects. A number of well-known models are special cases. In a counting process...

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are widespread. To account for endogeneity in...

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies, for example, report contradictory effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality – ranging from zero to large mortality reductions. Using data from 19 compulsory...

This paper investigates the relationships between social circumstances, individual behaviours, and ill-health later in life, with a particular focus on the development of cancer. A discrete latent factor model incorporating individuals' smoking and health outcomes (lifespan and time-to-cancer)...

This paper describes the pattern of reductions in mortality across Brazilian municipalities between 1970 and 2000, and analyzes its causes and consequences. It shows that, as in the international context, the relationship between income and life expectancy has shifted consistently in the recent...

This paper analyzes the direct and indirect impacts of Brazil's Family Health Program. We estimate the effects of the program on mortality and on household behavior related to child labor and schooling, employment of adults, and fertility. We find consistent effects of the program on reductions...

A number of studies suggest that mortality rates among East German men increased in the wake of reunification, in particular between 1989 and 1991, in some age groups by up to the thirty percent. This study first examines the developments of mortality and cause of death statistics based on...