In a recent paper, Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) argue that the large increases in population health witnessed in the 20th century may have lowered income levels. We argue that this result depends crucially on their assumption that initial health and income do not affect subsequent economic...

Using cross-country and Peruvian data, I show that victims of misfortune, particularly crime victims, are much more likely than non-victims to bribe public officials. Misfortune increases victims' demand for public services, raising bribery indirectly, and also increases victims' propensity to...

Childhood vaccinations are an important input to disease prevention, but vaccination rates have declined over the last decade due largely to parental fears about vaccine dangers. Education campaigns on the safety of vaccines seem to have little impact. Anecdotal evidence on disease outbreaks...

Disease has traveled with goods and people since the earliest times. Armed globalization spread disease, to the extent of eliminating entire populations. The geography of disease shaped patterns of colonization and industrialization throughout the now poor world. Many see related threats to...

This essay places the debate over human welfare during industrialization in the context of very long-term economic developments by examining an important aspect of living standards--health and nutrition--since the Middle Ages. I use average stature determined from military records along with a...

The quot;Easterlin paradoxquot; suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear...

In this paper we employ World Values Survey measures of life satisfaction as though they were direct measures of utility, and use them to evaluate alternative features and forms of government in large international samples. We find that life satisfaction is more closely linked to several World...

I search for a %u201Cscale%u201D effect in countries. I use a panel data set that includes 200 countries over forty years and link the population of a country to a host of economic and social phenomena. Using both graphical and statistical techniques, I search for an impact of size on the level...

The fear and hatred of others who are different has economic consequences because such feelings are likely to translate into discrimination in labor, credit, housing, and other markets. The implications range from earnings inequality to intergenerational mobility. Using German data from various...

We combine theory with data from different domains to provide an empirical analysis of the scale and variability of social capital as wealth. This is used to argue, given what we have learned in the literature on social capital, that the welfare returns to investing in trust could be...