This paper proposes the hypothesis that genetic distance to the health frontier influences population health outcomes. Evidence from a world sample suggests that genetic distance, interpreted as long-term cultural and biological divergence, is an important factor in understanding health...

Smallpox vaccination was the paramount medical innovation of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We exploit the introduction of the smallpox vaccine in Sweden to identify the causal effect of early-life mortality on fertility. Our analysis shows that parishes in counties with higher levels...

The effect of early exposure to malnutrition on the next generation’s cognitive abilities has rarely been studied in human beings in large part due to lack of data. A natural experiment, the Great Chinese Famine, and a novel dataset are employed to study this effect. The paper finds that the...

This paper tests a model of risk compensation that allows for “fatalism”: higher risks lead to more risk-taking, rather than less. Fatalism can be rational if the risk of each act exceeds a threshold value. I test this prediction by randomizing the provision of information about HIV risks in...

This paper studies systematic reporting heterogeneity in self-assessed health in India using World Health Survey (WHS)-SAGE survey that has subjective assessments on own health and hypothetical vignettes as well as objective measures like measured anthropometrics and performance tests on a range...

Economic development is a complex process and entails reductions in child mortality, improvements in children’s physical and cognitive development, increases in life expectancy, and production of goods and services reflecting a high “value added” of the labour force. It is therefore...

This paper proposes a methodology to predict the increase in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city of New York at the zip code level. We concentrate on the initial period of the pandemic spanning from March 31 to June 16, 2020. To do this, we propose a Poisson regression model for...

In this chapter, we first discuss the history of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) network of surveys and how its development is intertwined with the major aging trends around the world. This discussion includes the origins of the HRS model, the main distinguishing features of the HRS-type...

This research explores the persistent effect of the Neolithic Revolution on the evolution of life expectancy in the course of human history. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the onset of the Neolithic Revolution and the associated rise in infectious diseases triggered...

The SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus is an external shock to all societies with lasting impacts that have changed individual, political, and corporate decisions profoundly. Increasing evidence reveals that an estimated 10-50% of those previously infected with COVID-19 face a longer-term or long-term...