A large literature on persistence finds that many modern outcomes strongly reflect characteristics of the same places in the distant past. These studies typically combine unusually high t statistics with severe spatial autocorrelation in residuals, suggesting that some findings may be artefacts...

The paper provides initial evidence that excess mortality rates by locality can be used as a statistically reliable predictor of looming mortality crises. Using recently published daily deaths figures for 7,357 Italian municipalities, we estimate the growth in daily mortality rates between the...