It is easier to discover why people died in the past than how healthy they were during their lives. However, in both Europe and North America, much evidence survives about the health of young males from the medical examination of recruits to the armed forces. The paper discusses the possibility...

Data on human height can provide an index that may measure more accurately changes in the standard of living than the more conventional real wage index. Height data, like those on real wages, are relatively abundant and extend back to the seventeenth century. In a previous paper, we developed...

A sample covering 204,394 blocks from the 1990 U.S.Census permits measurement of residual heterogeneity from local area to local area after controlling by stratification for demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, sex as well as geographic characteristics such as region and...

Bongaarts and Feeney offer alternatives to period life expectancy with a set of demographic measures equivalent to each other under a Proportionality Assumption. Under this assumption, we show that the measures are given by exponentially weighted moving averages of earlier values of period life...

Considering the difficulties, the Census Bureau does a remarkably good job at counting people. This article discusses techniques for adjusting the census. If there is a large undercount, these techniques may be accurate enough for adjustment. With a small undercount, adjustment could easily...