Although cross section relationships are often taken to indicate causation, and especially the important impact of economic growth on many social phenomena, they may, in fact, merely reflect historical experience, that is, similar leader-follower country patterns for variables that are causally...

Several strands of research document the life-cycle impacts of lead exposure during the critical period of children's development. Yet little is known about long-run effects of lead exposure during early-life on old-age mortality outcomes. This study exploits the staggered installation of water...

This paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries. The estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to World War II and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown...

The plague visited unprecedented mortality on Europe for centuries, shifting the relative values of production inputs. It also changed the costs and benefits of defining and enforcing property rights. We develop a new property rights model to explain the decline in value of non-human factors of...

The objective of this paper is two-fold: (a) to corroborate Preston’s cross-country macro-level findings with the micro-level evidence from the demographic and health surveys (DHS); and (b) to examine, at the within-country regional level, the impact that health improvements may have had on...

This discussion paper led to an article in the <I>Journal of Human Resources</I> (2011). Volume 46(4), pages 695-721.<P> While there is no doubt that health is strongly correlated with education, whether schooling exerts a causal impact on health is not yet firmly established. We exploit Dutch compulsory...</p></i>

We provide a new explanation for sub-Saharan Africa’s slow demographic and economic change. In a model where children die from infectious disease, childhood health affects human capital and noninfectious-disease related adult mortality. When child mortality falls from lower prevalence, as in...

This is an effort at explaining the reasons and rationale behind the rising mortality rate (CDR) in the South Indian State – Andhra Pradesh. Although the state’s performance in socio-economic sphere seems to be not that impressive, its performance in demographic transition during the last...

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors such as the number of...

In this study we analyze the relationship between heat events and mortality in Germany. The main research questions are: Does heat lead to rising mortality and if yes, are the eects persistent or compensated for in the near future? Furthermore, we consider dierences between heat eects in urban...