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...

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...

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...

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...

Using microdata, i.e. representative samples of 114,403 German long-term care dependants (LTCDs) observed from 2000 to 2009 we give a comprehensive insight into the length of stay (LOS) in long-term care (LTC). Furthermore, this paper evaluates the effects of longevity on the LOS thus revisiting...

Bei bisherigen Vorausberechnungen der zukünftigen Anzahl an Pflegefällen wurde meist vereinfachend unterstellt, dass die altersspezifische Pflegewahrscheinlichkeit (Prävalenz) in Zukunft konstant bleibt. Diese in der Wissenschaft als Status quo Hypothese bezeichnete Annahme ist allerdings...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a suffciently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that...

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 schooling laws in a Regression Discontinuity Design applied to linked data from health surveys, tax files and...

We analyze interaction effects of birth weight and the business cycle at birth on individual cardiovascular (CV) mortality later in life. In addition, we examine to what extent these long-run effects run by way of cognitive ability and education and to what extent those mitigate the long-run...

This paper studies the relationship between retirement and mortality, using a unique administrative data set covering the full population of Norway. We make use of a series of retirement policy changes in Norway, which reduced the retirement age for a group of workers but not for others. By...