To assess the impact of interventions on well-being during war time, we analyze data from the birth records at the university maternity hospital of Basle in the period 1912-1920. Birth weight of children from medium SEP families decreased during the crisis years 1918 and 1919, but not for low...

When a negative shock affcts a cohort in utero, two things may happen: first, the population suffers detrimental consequences in later life; and second, some will die as a consequence of the shock, either in utero or early in life. The latter effect, often referred to as culling, may induce a bias...

Estimates of the effect of fetal health shocks may suffer from survivorship bias. The fetal origins literature seemingly agrees that survivorship bias is innocuous in the sense that it induces a bias toward zero. Arguably, however, selective mortality can imply a bias away from zero. In the case...

We hypothesize that recent trends in U.S. and worldwide obesity are, in part, related to an increase in the marginal rate of time preference, where time preference refers to the rate at which people are willing to trade current benefit for future benefit. The higher the rate of time preference,...

Underweight and obesity are associated with adverse health outcomes throughout the life course. We estimated the individual and combined prevalence of underweight or thinness and obesity, and their changes, from 1990 to 2022 for adults and school-aged children and adolescents in 200 countries...

In the face of mounting evidence of global warming, which is an irreversible process, central banks, as other policymakers, have to play their part. They need to consider climate risks not only in their internal management, but also when they devise their strategies, conduct their policies and...

In the last few years, the so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has been gaining prominence in the media and the public. This article presents the MMT approach to money and monetary policy, and discusses its recommendations regarding fiscal policy and aggregate demand management, the...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the pressure it has created on member states' public finances have led European authorities to suspend the EU's fiscal rules. In fact, these rules had long been criticised by academics and had only been abided by exceptionally. Beyond the rules themselves, the lessons...

We reply to the critics who contributed the other papers in the same issue of this journal. In the first part of the article, we indicate those remarks addressed to us, which we deem inappropriate to answer. The second part deals with the remarks we find useful to answer, which relate to money,...

Although there are currently four retail central bank digital currencies in circulation, no central bank has yet issued the wholesale form of a central bank digital currency. There are good reasons to do so, however, and central banks have already conducted projects in this area. A wholesale...