Ghana has the lowest under-five mortality rate in West Africa. Understanding why Ghana’s child mortality rate is lower than in neighboring countries may offer useful insights for other developing countries that are trying to improve child health. This paper explores whether Ghana’s lower...

Why does female genital cutting (FGC) persist in certain places while has declined elsewhere? Using survey data from the Gambia, we study an important aspect of the persistence of FGC, namely the relationship between (i) whether a woman has undergone FGC and (ii) her support for the practice....

Utopian socialists believed that socialism is inevitable because it is a more rational system to organize production and life, a system more in line with the “good” nature of human beings. Marxism rejected this reasoning replacing it with what is known as historical materialism: social...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

In the beginning of the 1890s, counties located in the Cotton Belt of the American South were hit by an agricultural plague, the boll weevil, that adversely affected cotton production and hence the demand for labor. We use variation in the incidence of the boll weevil multiplied with counties’...

An atlas of settlement patterns in 19th century America is produced based on microdata from the 1880 census of the United States and the 1881 census of the United Kingdom. The first part of the atlas shows migration from state or country of parental origin to county of residence, for persons...

Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the rising net price of children. But empirical tests of such theories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this price and by endogeneity bias. I develop a model of household production in the 19th century United States...

The comparison of Mexico’s 2009 A/H1N1 outbreak with the U.S. H1N1 outbreak of 1976 provides notable observations—based on the strengths and weaknesses of each country’s response—that can be used as a starting point of discussion for the design of effective Emerging Infectious Diseases...

In 1970 the USA spent 7% of its GNP on healthcare, in 200716%. Whereas the OECD average per capita expenditure on healthcare in 2007 was $2,964, the USA spent $7,290. Yet in that same period, the health of America’s citizens relative to those of other developed countries declined dramatically,...

Wildlife policy in Kenya has in most part been protectionist with little incentives to private landowners, who host wildlife in their farms to participate in their conservation. However, in recognition of the role of incentives in conservation, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) piloted a wildlife...