The social changes in Poland over the last two decades have had an impact on many dimensions of life, including on important elements of human capital, such as health and functional and instrumental daily activities. This article contains an overview of the available data and indicators on...

Background: Studies from several countries have shown that self-rated health is an independent predictor of mortality. However, no empirical evidence exists for Germany so far. We investigate the effectiveness of (i) self-ratings of health by individuals and (ii) changes in self-rated health, as...

In Hungary, the health status of working age men is extremely bad in comparison with both the developed market economies and the neighboring transition countries. The study based on data between 1960 and 2004 investigates the health status of population in Hungary and Austria by...

A recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival. But equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant. Using state-level panel data...

This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic in Taiwan as a natural experiment to test whether in utero conditions affect long-run developmental outcomes. Combining several historical and current datasets, we find that cohorts in utero during the pandemic are shorter as child/teenagers, less...

Policy-makers worldwide are embarking on school programmes aimed at boosting students' resilience. One facet of resilience is a belief about cause and effect in life, locus of control. I test whether positive control beliefs work as a psychological buffer against health shocks in adulthood. To...

We exploit exogenous variation in the risk of waterborne disease created by implementation of a major water reform in Mexico in 1991 to investigate impacts of infant exposure on indicators of cognitive development and academic achievement in late childhood. We estimate that a one standard...

For all climatic regions, mortality due to cold exceeds mortality due to heat. We examine whether cold-related mortality in adulthood varies positively with unusually benign ambient temperature during gestation, using data on over 13,500 Swedes from the Uppsala Birth Cohort Study born in...