Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia's 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994 (the "Russian Mortality Crisis"). Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol related causes and among working-age men (the heaviest drinkers), this paper...

We study the effect of a compulsory education reform in Sweden on adult health and mortality. The reform was implemented by municipalities between 1949 and 1962 as a social experiment and implied an extension of compulsory schooling from 7 or 8 years depending on municipality to 9 years...

This paper examines the impact of universal, free, and easily accessible primary healthcare on population health as measured by age-specific birth and mortality rates, focusing on a nationwide socialized medicine program implemented in Turkey. The Family Medicine Program (FMP), launched in 2005,...

This paper considers the effects of a policy that links retirement age to life expectancy. We focus on the effects on healthy life expectancy before and after retirement, and on the likelihood of being in good health at retirement age. To investigate these effects, we use a stochastic projection...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the association between income and mortality over a three year period for working-age Spaniards. Method Data on 693,994 individuals was taken from a social security sampling using a logit model to estimate the probabilities of death for each income decile...

The Nordic countries have the lowest maternal and child mortality rates in the world. This has not always been the case. In 1887 the mortality rates in Norway were similar to those of developing countries today. During the next 34 years, Norwegian maternal mortality was halved and infant...

Theoretically, there are several reasons to expect education to have a positive effect on health, and empirical research suggests that education can be an important health determinant. However, it has not yet been established whether education and health are indeed causally-related, and the...

Recent studies have shown that COVID-19 affects different population groups asymmetrically. This work uses data from the National Survey of Households-PNAD COVID-19/IBGE-to quantify the socioeconomic inequality in health during the first wave of COVID-19 infections in Brazil. We use the...

This paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a lower bound on...

One of the most common policy prescriptions to reduce the spread of COVID-19 has been to legally enforce social distancing through state or local shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs). This paper is the first to explore the comparative effectiveness of early county-level SIPOs versus later statewide...