Our goal here is to offer a better understanding of why workhouse mortality was as high as it was, how it varied across Ireland, and how it affected different groups in the population such as women or children.

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important factor for life expectancy. The key and novel mechanism of the model is that parents face a tradeoff between the quantity of children and the childhood development...

Proposes an economic-growth model that adheres to the salient features of the European economies during the millennium prior to the Industrial Revolution and shows how the Industrial Revolution, generated by the model, can be conceptualized as an escape from the Malthusian trap.

A number of studies suggest that mortality rates among East German men increased in the wake of reunification, in particular between 1989 and 1991, in some age groups by up to the thirty percent. This study first examines the developments of mortality and cause of death statistics based on...

This paper documents differences in body size between white, black, and Indian mid-nineteenth century American men and investigates the socioeconomic and demographic determinants of frame size using a unique data set of Civil War soldiers. It finds that over time men have grown taller and...

We examine the role of declining mortality in explaining the rise of retirement over the course of the 20th century. We construct a model in which individuals make labor/leisure choices over their lifetimes subject to uncertainty about their date of death. In an environment in which mortality is...

We develop a simple overlapping generations model to analytically show that population aging leads to increased educational efforts through a general equilibrium effect. The key mechanism at work in the model is that scarcity of raw labor increases the rate of return to human capital relative to...

How long we live, and how long members of our families and social groups live, is extraordinarily important to us. It's not a subject of daily discussion, but it would be if we were threatened with a return to earlier conditions. Unfortunately, the subject of longevity falls between the cracks...