This paper examines variations in stature and the Body Mass Index (BMI) across space for the United States in 1917/18, using published data on the measurement of approximately 890,000 recruits for the American Army for World War I. It also connects those anthropometric measurements with an index...

The U.S. fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation's development, but it also took place long before the nation's mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles...

This paper deals with the issue of using infant and childhood mortality as an indicator of inequality. The case is that of the United States in the 20th century. Using microdata from the 1900 and 1910 Integrated Public Use Microsamples (IPUMS), published data from the Birth Registration Area in...

Previous investigators argued that increasing 5-year survival for cancer patients should not be taken as evidence of improved prevention, screening, or therapy, because they found little correlation between the change in 5-year survival for a specific tumor and the change in tumor-related...

Over the course of the nineteenth century manufacturing in the United States shifted from artisan shop to factory production. At the same time United States experienced a "transportation revolution", a key component of which was the building of extensive railroad network. Using a newly created...

All nations that can be characterized as developed have undergone the demographic transition from high to low levels of fertility and mortality. Most presently developed nations began their fertility transitions in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The United States was an...

Estimates of mortality models imply that actual life expectancy of HIV/AIDS patients in 2001 was 13.4 years higher than it would have been if the drug utilization rate had not increased from its 1993 level. Estimates of a model of hospital discharges imply that increased utilization of HIV drugs...

Most of the estimated effects are small and the signs are not wholly consistent with either model, under the null hypothesis that agriculture was the chief beneficiary of rail access. For example, we find that rail access appears to have increased urbanization, raised the likelihood of...

A patent only protects an innovator from others producing the same product, but it does not protect him from others producing better products under new patents. Therefore, one may divide up the source of competition facing an innovator into within-patent competition, which results from...