The Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-19 was one of the most devastating diseases in history, killing perhaps as many as 50-100 million people worldwide. In addition to the high death toll and the high general lethality, the disease had a peculiar feature: the largest increase in death rates...

For the purpose of studying the consequences of the ageing of the Swedish population a group of scientists have enlarged the microsimulation model SESIM - originally developed at the Swedish Ministry of Finance - with modules that simulate health status, take up of sickness benefits, retirement,...

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...

We investigate universalization of access to health in Brazil. We find large reductions in maternal, foetal, neonatal and post-neonatal mortality, a reduction in fertility and, possibly on account of selection, no change in the quality of births. Using rich administrative data, we investigate...

This paper studies systematic reporting heterogeneity in self-assessed health in India using World Health Survey (WHS)-SAGE survey that has subjective assessments on own health and hypothetical vignettes as well as objective measures like measured anthropometrics and performance tests on a range...

We analyze the effects of a vaccination program providing free flu vaccine to individuals aged 65 or more on take-up and hospitalization. By using linked patient-general practitioner (GP) data, we implement a regression discontinuity design around the threshold at age 65. We find that the...

Male life expectancy at birth fell by over six years in Russia between 1989 and 1994. Many other countries of the former Soviet Union saw similar declines, and female life expectancy fell as well. Using cross-country and Russian household survey data, we assess six possible explanations for this...

Using data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and fitting family fixed-effects models of child health and cognitive development, we test if left-handed children do significantly worse than their right-handed counterparts. The health measures cover both physical and mental health,...

Little research has been done on the body mass index values of 19th century US African-Americans and whites. This paper uses 19th century US prison records to demonstrate that although modern BMIs have increased in the 20th century, 19th century black and white BMIs were distributed...

Dean Baker and Adriane Fugh-Berman have published a critique of a study I performed in 2007, entitled Why has longevity increased more in some states than in others?" One of the conclusions I drew from that study was that medical innovation accounts for a substantial portion of recent increases...