I investigate how the relationship between health status and retirement among older men has changed since 1900 using weight adjusted for height or Body Mass Index (BMI) as a proxy for health. I find that both in 1900 and in 1985-1991 the relative risk of labor force non-participation increases...

I investigate how the relationship between the wage and the length of the work day has changed since the 1890s among prime-aged men and women. I find that across wage deciles deciles, and within industry and occupation groups the most highly paid worked fewer hours than the lowest paid in the...

During the Civil War not all men served honorably and this was known by everyone in their communities. We study how shame and ostracism affect behavior by examining whether men who deserted from the Union Army, and who faced no legal sanctions once the war was over, returned home or whether they...

I demonstrate that although socioeconomic differences in birth weight have always been" fairly small in the United States, they have narrowed since the beginning of this century. I argue" that maternal height, and therefore the mother's nutritional status during her growing years accounted for...

Functional disability (difficulty in walking , difficulty in bending, paralysis, blindness in at least one eye, and deafness in at least one ear) in the United States has fallen at an average annual rate of 0.6 percent among men age 50 to 74 from the early twentieth century to the early 1990s....

Explanations for the decline in labor force participation rates of older men prior to 1950 have focused on the sectoral shift from agriculture to manufacturing. Labor force participation rates of men living in farm households have been consistently higher than those of men living in non-farm...

In the late 19th Century, cities in Western Europe and the United States suffered from high levels of infectious disease. Over a 40 year period, there was a dramatic decline in infectious disease deaths in cities. As such objective progress in urban quality of life took place, how did the media...

We use detailed microeconomic data to investigate why aggregate residential electricity consumption in California has been flat since 1980. Using unique micro data, we document the role that household demographics and ideology play in determining electricity demand. We show that building codes...

“Nudges” are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation. We show that the popular electricity conservation “nudge” of providing feedback to households on own and peers’ home electricity usage in a home electricity report is two to four times more effective with political...

Debilitating events could leave either frailer or more robust survivors, depending on the extent of scarring and mortality selection. The majority of empirical analyses find frailer survivors. I find heterogeneous effects. Among severely stressed former Union Army POWs, which effect dominates 35...